


Solid Skies and Slate-Blue Earth Below

by quietcoast



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alien Ian, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Eventual Romance, Happy Ending, M/M, Road Trips, Slow Burn, The Desert, emotional journeys disguised as physical journeys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-03-12 02:16:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13537566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietcoast/pseuds/quietcoast
Summary: It was as dark as it could get in the city, with its perpetual haze of yellow-gray light ringing the horizon. Mickey’s eyes were half open, unfocused, directed vaguely toward the one tiny pinprick of light that had managed to glow through the screen of rainclouds and smog. If he hadn’t been so out of it, Mickey might have thought it was a little weird that there was a star visible in the first place—almost seeming to hang in front of the clouds rather than behind them—but he didn’t. He peered through his lashes, eyes glazed over, as the only obvious light in the sky did nothing of interest.Until it did.*When late summer comes to Chicago, it finds Mickey Milkovich listless, directionless, and truly alone for the first time in his life. Mickey is content to leave his empty hours empty, but the universe has other plans: A mysterious force attaches itself to Mickey and urges him to leave his life behind, togo, come on, come on----and so he does.





	1. Chapter 1

August in Chicago was humid, cloaked. Every afternoon came the rain. The shuddering groan of thunder pushed its way through gaps, between the buildings that made up the city’s jagged shark mouth, to rumble through the screens of open kitchen windows, to send the hordes of fat summer rabbits scurrying. Sometimes the clouds would be all, the occasional complaint of thunder would be all, but Mickey had always liked it best when it started with a harsh _crack_ that he could feel in his teeth. The first time he could remember being a kid and hearing that sound, feeling the smacking echo of white light in his little chest, he had been terrified. Shaking. He had _loved_ it.

But today the thunderclouds rolled in thick and heavy, and Mickey’s head felt like it was splitting open.

That’s how it was now, at least. Earlier had been—well. Different. The last couple days, actually, there’d been some stuff—but Mickey hadn’t thought it was a big deal, and maybe it wasn’t, whatever. Either way, the storm was here, and it seemed to have sent Mickey careening down the tight spirals of some kind of fucked up internal roller coaster.

At first, the clouds arriving had just been like passing an acquaintance on the street—a flick of the eyes, a casual nod of recognition, maybe a little wave, then it’s over. That rain smell had drifted in, bumped past his nose, the sky had grumbled noncommittally—was it four o’clock already? Mickey glanced at the clock on the VCR, a relic wedged under the DVD player, still inexplicably hooked up even though the time was the only part of it that worked anymore. Shit. Yeah, okay, four-thirty. Whatever. It wasn’t like there was anyone else at home to judge Mickey for sitting on his ass all day.

He hadn’t turned the TV on. He hadn’t even turned the _light_ on. The inside of the Milkovich house looked grey, greyer than usual, that special afternoon-thunderstorm-warning-grey that as a kid you build a blanket fort in, that as an adult you drive home from work in, cursing the idiots who drive 70 in the snow every winter but lose their shit and slow to a crawl at the sight of a couple raindrops.

Mickey wasn’t really either of those things, not a kid or an adult. He had turned nineteen three days ago, celebrated by himself with a bottle of whiskey he’d lifted from the corner store down the street, broken into what was left of Iggy’s stash of weed. He didn’t think it would matter at this point; it had been three months since he’d seen any of his brothers, five months since his dad had died in a coke-fueled joyride that had ended in an Indiana highway ditch, a year since Mandy had gone missing or maybe just fuckin’ left, who knows, and ten years since his mom had OD’ed. There wasn’t anyone left to give a shit what Mickey did.

The last time Iggy had been around he’d said some dumb shit about how they were technically orphans now. Mickey had just snorted. He thought there should be a different word for it, for when life actually got better after your only remaining shithead parent finally crashed into something he couldn’t bully his way through.

So Mickey was mostly alone these days, and that was fine. He still had some connections left over from before, people he sold to enough to keep the electricity on, one or two guys he could call to fuck around with if he wanted to, though mostly he didn’t want to. It was comfortable to stay in, lean against the ugly blanket draped over the back of the couch, and think of when he and Mandy used to stretch it over the coffee table until they had a cave. Mandy had told him once that she thought her earliest memory was of jamming herself under that table with Mickey, peering through the gaps in the blanket to watch old _Scooby Doo_ episodes that someone had recorded off the TV when they still had cable.

He sat, tried unsuccessfully to thread some loose yarn back into the blanket, and grunted familiarly at the rain when it started tapping on the roof—but then. There was the first real shake of thunder, an enormous beast turning over in its sleep, and an accompanying flash of lightning, all introduced with a sound like a whip. _Crack._

Mickey felt it in his throat, in the bones of his arms—an expected jolt, a punching thrill tickling between his ribs. But instead of dissipating with the sound, that excited little twitch thinned out, spread through his body and into his limbs in a smooth buzz that had his breath catching. Suddenly he felt itchy, electric, like he could run, like he _wanted_ to run. He had so much energy that he couldn’t even fuckin’ move, not even to tap his foot or to clutch uselessly at something, not even to take a swallow of water into his painfully dry mouth. His body was a shivering prison. It felt like something was curling in his head, heavy and warm, then down his spine, a whisper just under the surface he couldn’t hear, then— _oh._ Fuck. Fuck, he wanted someone to _fuck_ him, all of the buzzing and the weight was burning slow and he was hard, squirming, whole body humming in time with his tripping heart rate; he was reaching down behind himself with two fingers and rocking back against them, palming himself with his other hand, and it wasn’t enough, and his mouth was open, and he was groaning out loud like a little bitch—but then the feeling shifted again, flitted out, and it felt like an annoyance to get himself off, so he stopped, and then he was laughing.

Giddiness bubbled up in the pit of his stomach, but it felt kind of like panic, too, and he was straight up giggling, out loud, to no one. “Fuck,” he whispered to himself between lurches of hysteria, and the laughter was the only thing he could imagine in the whole world, for what seemed like forever, until it transformed itself into a roll of nausea. “Oh, fuck,” he choked out again, then threw himself off the couch and barely made it to the kitchen before he was heaving and heaving, the Lucky Charms and swigs of warm beer he had called breakfast that morning splattering new and interesting designs onto the linoleum floor.

He threw up until he couldn’t anymore, then pushed himself away from the mess and curled up with his back against the fridge. Distantly, he could feel papers and magnets falling onto him, but it barely registered through the sick swish of his insides, the high keening sound in his head that was building into a crushing headache. God fucking damn it, everything _hurt_.

Black smudges floated in front of his eyes every time he tried to open them, so Mickey stopped doing that. It could have been five minutes or an hour that he stayed there on the floor, palms pressed against his face, legs drawn up and shaking. He wasn’t really sure. He could feel the floor under his cheek, long since warmed to the temperature of his body; his head was a feverish, thumping throb of agony.

But eventually, through the pain, came something else: a tug.

It was in his forehead, in the center of his chest, a persistent drag of energy that thrummed like the heat down his spine did, like a whisper, _come on, come on_. Almost against his will, he felt himself draw up to his knees; he retched again, but nothing came up, and then he was stumbling to his feet, to the door. He was in the yard, through the gate, down the street before he knew what he was doing, headed toward the first orange glints of sun crawling out from under the clouds.

It was good, moving toward the trickle of western light. It made his head feel minutely better, made the heavy tingle smoothing up and down his back feel encouraging rather than nauseating. He didn’t know where he was. It was good, to walk.

A window cleared in the clouds. The storm was moving out, and it wasn’t that good anymore. The pores on his face felt like the holes in one of those Play-Doh spaghetti makers, and there was all of this feeling and sickness being yanked out of him in a big fluid rush, murmurs being pulled in strings through his skin, rushing in his ears, and then all of it was gone.

Mickey’s head was pounding dully when he came back to himself. He was leaning precariously toward the curb, had somehow made his way back near the corner store, sun shining in his eyes through the last faint wisps of distant cloud cover. He tried to raise his hands to his face. They were shaking.

Jittery, he glanced around. Whispered to himself, “What the _fuck_.” He made his legs move, away from the curb, back down the street, down another street, turn, back to the house. Through the door. The house smelled sour, but then he remembered what state the kitchen floor was in. He made himself find some paper towels, used most of the roll to clean up his mess, used the rest of the roll to wipe around some generic, bright green soap that was meant to be mixed with water, but he just dumped it onto the floor right out of the bottle and called it good.

After that, Mickey was exhausted. He left all of the green, soap-soaked paper towels in a heap on the floor, suddenly unable to do anything but feel his way to the couch, burrow into it headfirst, and fall asleep.

 

*

The night of his birthday, Mickey had gotten stupidly, exceptionally crossfaded. He had worked his way through a good bit of his stolen whiskey, lit up some of what was left in Iggy’s dresser, and went to sit outside. Stargazing wasn’t really possible in Chicago—too many lights, too much pollution—but even if watching for shooting stars or whatever had been as easy as just looking up, Mickey wouldn’t do it. Like, really, he was gay, but not _that_ gay.

So he definitely hadn’t been looking at the stars like a jackass; it just so happened that he was feeling pleasantly dull and relaxed, and with his head leaned all comfortable against one of the peeling wooden posts on the front porch, the easiest place to look was up.

It was as dark as it could get in the city, with its perpetual haze of yellow-gray light ringing the horizon. Mickey’s eyes were half open, unfocused, directed vaguely toward the one tiny pinprick of light that had managed to glow through the screen of rainclouds and smog. If he hadn’t been so out of it, Mickey might have thought it was a little weird that there was a star visible in the first place—almost seeming to hang in front of the clouds rather than behind them—but he didn’t. He peered through his lashes, eyes glazed over, as the only obvious light in the sky did nothing of interest.

Until it did.

Slowly, slowly, the light moved. Mickey blinked. Maybe it hadn’t—but, no, there it went again. The movement was almost imperceptible, but sure enough, the star crept upward in a straight, precise line. A little more awake now, Mickey took note of where the light was, hanging in the sky parallel to the topmost branch of one of the neighbor’s trees. The light paused—one second, two—then dragged left, agonizingly slow, another straight line like it was following the edge of a ruler. Pause. Up. Up, up, no longer even with the tree, but just above it.

Mickey lazily watched the light trace its course, probably for three hours or more, he wasn’t sure, but long enough that it had moved up too far for him to see. He wasn’t particularly concerned. He figured he was high enough that seeing some little floaty lights wasn’t anything to be worried about.

After he’d fought through his hangover the next morning, Mickey thought about it a little more. He thought it was kind of funny, that as far as hallucinations went it was a pretty fucking boring one. Why had he stayed outside for so long? It wasn’t like anything cool had been happening. At the most, it had been his brain reminding him that geometry and science were both dull as fuck and that he’d done the right thing by dropping out of high school.

He was maybe a little curious, though. It wasn’t like he had much else going on these days. By afternoon, he had convinced himself that it definitely hadn’t been real, and that he should sit outside again later and watch, just to prove it to himself. Just to make sure.

Except that night, it happened again. The little light was there, and it moved, up, sideways, up. It was like it had been waiting for him to come outside, winking bright when he caught sight of it like it was making eye contact. Mickey watched for a minute, in morbid fascination, then shuddered. Turned around. Went _the fuck back inside_ , and bolted the door.

*

The nausea was never as bad as it was that first time, but the headaches were.

When the storms came, they chose bits of Mickey to scramble, to tug at, to electrify. Mickey spent his afternoons churning inside his body, eyes clenched shut as his head pounded, as he drank unpleasant swallows of Gatorade to try and force the bile down his throat, as he let his head fall back and his mouth fall open while gentle, probing sparks skittered through the lower half of his body and urged his hands to follow along behind them. Sometimes it sounded like there was a kettle in his skull, screaming out shrill jets of scalding water vapor like a blistering dog whistle. Sometimes it felt like something with a mouth was muttering through the thick, pink muscles of his shoulders, nudging words against his skin from the inside. Sometimes it was hard to understand what was being said. Sometimes it wasn’t.

Sometimes, the mouths pressed, and tickled, and said _come on_. They tugged at him. They bit the word _west_ into his cheeks, into his palms, into the cords of muscle on either side of his neck. He had never thought about those muscles at all, before. _Sternocleidomastoid,_ the body-voice pulsed helpfully, right into his lower lip, into his tongue. Fear shocked through him. He had never heard that word, before. That word was not his, even as he felt his jaw shift to make room for it.

On days when it actually rained, his legs would move him out of the house and down the street and _away_ , and he would come back to his body when the clouds cleared. That first day, he had found himself outside of the corner store, the one he terrorized every time he ran out of Doritos or Snickers bars or alcohol. The guy who ran the place was a fucking pansy, and all Mickey had to do was amble in, raise his eyebrows, and take what he wanted. Mickey thought it was a pretty good system. That first day, he had tilted on the sidewalk, toward the road and away from the maroon awning that blared KASH AND GRAB in several different font sizes. He had thought that ending up all the way there without really knowing it until afterwards had been bad enough.

The second day, he made it to the Chuck-E-Cheese by his old high school. He had never attended high school with enough regularity to accomplish much learning there, but he had managed to make a fair amount of money selling coke and oxy to the kids with lockers near his, so the experience hadn’t been totally worthless.

When the clouds cleared enough to allow pink evening sunlight to stripe Mickey’s face, he coughed and stumbled back into control of his body at the edge of the parking lot, all to a wide-eyed audience of six-year-olds clutching suckers and plastic bracelets and unspent, grimy Chuck-E-Cheese tokens.

The third day, he came back to himself at a bus stop. His eyelid was twitching. _West_ , it reminded him. The fourth day, he found himself in the driver’s seat of an unfamiliar car, with no memory of how he had gotten there. He didn’t think he had stolen the car—not that he couldn’t deal with it if he had—but it would really be a lot easier to avoid that kind of problem if he could manage it. The car was a newer automatic, not the easiest model to hotwire, and he didn’t see the keys anywhere, so he got the fuck out of there as soon as he could and remained cautiously hopeful that the cops wouldn’t be banging on his door later that day. Mickey didn’t think it would be very fun to hide from the Chicago PD while the fucking sky tried to take his body for a joyride.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh days were miraculously sunny, hot in the way that baked into the asphalt and left sweat still dripping long into the night. Usually Mickey despised the sticky heat of summer, but he couldn’t feel anything but grateful to have entire days as the sole operator of his limbs. If he was being honest with himself, the whole situation was freaking him the fuck out. He took those three days to sleep through the mornings, eat the contents of the dented cans of spaghetti-o’s and peaches that he found in the back of a kitchen cabinet, turn the TV on and off a few times, and start drinking for real around 3 pm. He took two showers in as many days, which was a new record, probably. Mickey couldn’t remember the last time he had showered, before. He used Mandy’s shampoo; it was still propped precariously on its end on the corner of the bathtub, even a year later. It smelled like coconut, and there was no one to tell him not to use it.

The eighth day, he woke up and found a piece of paper taped to the front door.

SELL YOUR HOUSE FOR A REASONABLE PRICE, it said. MOTIVATED BUYERS INTERESTED IN LOCAL PROPERTIES.

The front of the flyer featured a picture of a big, clean looking white house, complete with a fence and a frothy looking tree in the front yard. There was a phone number, too, taking up the entire bottom of the paper; the text was bold and white and demanding, jumping out overtop of a background of red and blue rectangles. Very patriotic. When Mickey ripped the thing off the door, the surface of the paper felt slick and luxurious. His fingertips gritted against the darkest areas of ink.

The flyer sat on the kitchen table all morning, where Mickey couldn’t look at it. He thought about it, though. He wondered how much money his family’s shit pile of a house could possibly go for; he didn’t think it could be very much, compared to houses that had never been a crime scene or a meth lab. On the other hand, even the cheapest house was worth tens of thousands of dollars more than the jack shit Mickey currently had, so maybe, in the grand scheme of things, whatever it was worth was a lot.

When the rain came that afternoon, it came in fat, gentle spatters that polka-dotted the sidewalks and drummed intermittently against the windows. Mickey’s skin felt too tight, but the ache in his head was dull and his stomach wasn’t rolling, which was better than usual. Every time he looked at the window, his shoulder twitched. Pleased murmurs brushed themselves into the dip of his collarbone.

Around 8 o’clock, he found himself standing stiffly in the kitchen, a pale smudge in a house that had grown dark around him. He felt like a haunting, dark hair blurring into dark surroundings, some kind of _Paranormal Activity_ shit brought to life. The rain had stopped. His hands and feet were numb from staying in one position for so long, however long it had been. He was fixated over the flyer on the table.

Mickey breathed, steady, short. He could feel the emptiness of the house, how it pressed around him. He could feel exactly how much space he took up in it, the volume of air in him and out of him. His chest, holding and releasing. He had been so small the first time thunder shook in his body, but his lungs felt like they opened the same amount then that they did now, like if he just kept breathing and breathing and never let any of the air back out, he would make more room in his body for something else to come in. Anything. A feeling. Heat. Space.

Suddenly, it seemed unlikely that he was even breathing at all—Mickey, the last Milkovich in the house, the only living thing left for the air to bend around. Alive. He let his hand slide over the flyer, smudgy, sweaty, sleek. He breathed in, and it was an inevitability.

*

Mickey sold the house.

Well, first, he had a fake will made. He knew that the house was in his dad’s name, but Terry Milkovich was fucking dead, and since Mickey was the only one still there he figured the house should be his anyway. So he pawned the TV and the least ostentatious guns, sold the automatic weaponry to some “private collectors”, and unloaded all the drugs left in the house. He used the money to pay a guy he knew, in the way that people doing business in the South Side know other people doing business in the South Side, to forge all the paperwork declaring that Taras Volodymyr Milkovich, being of sound mind and body and under no duress to do so, leaves the house and property located at 1955 S Trumbull Ave to his son Mikhailo Aleksandr Milkovich.

When he had the house officially transferred over, Mickey told the people that he found his dad’s will in a pile of papers under a bed, told them that if they had seen the state the house was left in, they would understand why a will hadn’t been found earlier. The whole thing turned out to be way more complicated than Mickey had thought it would be; for instance, he had to dig out his actual driver’s license when he’d been using fake ID’s since before his 16th birthday. He had to pretend to provide valid phone numbers for his brothers and Mandy, so they could be notified. He had to talk to a bunch of lawyery-looking fucks that he hated on principle. The whole thing was annoying, especially since he could only make his appointments in the mornings, or on days when the weather was guaranteed to be clear and hot.

He got it done. Next, he called the number on the flyer. He talked to a lady who said her name was Amy, and who sounded way happier than she had any right to sound, considering what kind of house she was buying. When she came by to speak with him in person, she brought another woman with her, who she introduced as her wife, Melissa. They were thrilled that he had decided to sell. Mickey hated them. He wondered what gave them the right to walk down a street in the South Side, touching each others shoulders and hands casually while they talked about the benefits of coconut oil; how they _dared_ to knock on the door of a house where Milkoviches had lived for decades and use a word like _wife_.

Mickey sold all of the rest of the shit that had any value, threw some stuff away, left a lot in the house just to spite _Amy and Melissa_ because he knew they would have to clean the place out if he didn’t do it. He kept his clothes, a couple books, the blanket off the back of the couch. He found his birth certificate in a dusty file folder along with Iggy’s, and took both of them. He didn’t find Mandy’s anywhere, but he kept the bottle of shampoo.

The offensive fucking lesbians made him an offer. He argued a little, to see if he could drive the number any higher, and it turned out that he could. Mickey had been right in thinking that he would get far less money than what a house was worth, and far more money than he had ever seen in his life.

He had to open a bank account, which somehow was not something he had anticipated. Mickey went in the morning—to a Wells Fargo, because he knew where it was—and pretended like he knew the difference between a checking and a savings account.

He spent the afternoon shaking apart on his bare mattress. The heat brushing down his spine felt heavy and approving, and stroked sounds out of him like he was a particularly out of tune piano. The word _west_ was in his mouth. This time, he put it there himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends~
> 
> So, I know that recently, Shameless has had some Ideas™ about Ian Gallagher, and, conversely, very few Ideas™ about Mickey Milkovich. But here's the thing: Ian/Mickey is the hill I plan to die on, so, y'know, whatever.
> 
> This story is the longest thing I've ever written. It is also what the lining of my soul looks like. It's going be a lot weird and a lot sweet and a lot about how cool the sky is when it turns colors.
> 
> Sorry in advance if:
> 
> •scorpions aren't your deal
> 
> •you know Actual Things about science
> 
> •you have ever been to Iowa and enjoyed it
> 
> Title is from "Never Quite Free" by The Mountain Goats, which is an incredible song that is a good thing to listen to if you wanna feel some stuff.
> 
> Feel free to yell at me in the comment section! I'm also on tumblr as [sentimentalspiders](https://sentimentalspiders.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

The car was a black Jeep, two years younger than Mickey was. The hood was peeling, the driver’s seat was split down the side and hemorrhaging stale yellow foam, and when Mickey opened the door, the hot air rolling out smelled like cigarette smoke and dirt. The back seats were already put down, and the flat expanse in the back of the car was more than big enough to carry all of Mickey’s shit.

It was parked on the street in a neighborhood almost an hour away from Mickey’s house. He didn’t remember getting there. He hated this routine, of ending up places and having to find the nearest L station with the lines he needed, or a bus stop with a bus leaving soon in the right direction, or just walking, with trembling legs and acid in the back of his throat. He hated standing unsteadily in puddles. He hated falling into bed with his shoulders still wet. The beginning of September saw a drastic decrease in precipitation, but the amount of rainfall in the last month had been a record high. He wondered if it was somehow his fault. He couldn’t imagine what winter might be like, if the rules would be the same, if snow was the same as rain because it was all water falling from the sky, or if the most important ingredient in this whole fucked up experience was the thunder, or the lightning, or the damp, charged air.

He wanted out.

Someone had written across the back window of the Jeep in white paint marker, “For Sale By Owner 2200 OBO”. The sale on the house had just gone through, and _Amy and Melissa_ in their ever-present and obnoxious agreeability had allowed him two weeks to get out while they settled things with the apartment complex they had been living in. The money from the sale was burning in Mickey’s bank account, and he had a deadline that ended in homelessness, and his head fucking hurt, and when he raised his thumb to rub at his mouth the touch felt like a conversation.

Mickey paid attention to the path he took to get back home. The next morning, he went back and bought the car.

*

The farthest Mickey had ever been from home was Kentucky. He remembered what it had been like in the back of his dad’s shitbox Chevy Corsica that night; he was in the middle, lap-belted in place while Iggy squirmed on his left and Jamie leaned forward on his right to argue with Joey. Joey was in the front seat because he was the oldest, but Jamie thought he should have gotten to sit next to dad because his birthday was coming up. Terry dealt with the situation by alternating between bellowing at them to shut the fuck up and ignoring them altogether.

Mickey remembered letting his head lean back against the stained upholstery—there were no headrests, but even if there had been, he was too short, anyway, he had always been so goddamn short—to peer around Jamie’s hunched back and out the window. His pants were too big, and all of the leaning and moving had dragged the waistband down to press uncomfortably between his ass and the seat. Eight-year-old Mickey’s face had been round, his hands had been pudgy, but everything else about him had been knobby and small. His tailbone seemed to be situated against every lump in the whole car; his left knee ached where it dug into Iggy’s leg.

Lights flashed by in the window, streetlights, lights from the donut shop and the Jiffy Lube and the Arby’s, lights from the other cars once they got on the interstate. Terry Milkovich had some kind of business out of town, and Mickey had heard his mom say that she and Mandy needed some “girl time”, that she didn’t care whether Terry was going to Kentucky or to the moon, but that he’d better figure out a way to get the boys out of her hair for the weekend or she wouldn’t be around when he got back.

Mickey couldn’t see the moon out the window. Maybe there was no moon at all.

The trip was a long one, at least for a kid, and Mickey fell asleep eventually. It was dark outside, black above and black below with a thin, fiery strip of sunset separating the sky from the land. The world looked like it was a shuttered eyelid, slitted and closing, fluttering towards sleep just like Mickey’s eyes were.

When he woke up, they were in the parking lot of a Motel 6, pulled up outside a room with paint chipping off the door around the brass room number. Iggy had elbowed him in the stomach in his scramble to escape the car, so Mickey made sure to grumble his annoyance as he crawled out after his older brother. He was also a little excited, though; he had never been to a motel before.

The room wasn’t actually all that great, but it still felt like an adventure. There were two queen beds inside, side by side with an end table between them that held a yellow-looking lamp. There was a Bible in the drawer, but someone had put out cigarettes all over its cover and it was decorated with rough, round burns. The floors creaked sharply under the stampede of prepubescent feet, and the water pooling out of the bathroom suggested that something in there had flooded recently, but there was a TV, which was the only thing that really mattered. Joey turned on some movie about shark attacks while Terry went back outside, started the car, and drove off. They barely noticed when he did.

It didn’t take long for all of them to fall back asleep, Iggy and Jamie on one bed, Joey sprawled and snoring on the other with Mickey curled towards the TV in the remaining space. One of Mickey’s feet was kicked up onto Joey’s arm, and his head rested at the end of the mattress, dark hair flattened against another plastic-edged cigarette burn in the comforter.

In the morning, Terry still wasn’t back. Around noon, Jamie dug around in the single backpack they had brought with them and found twenty dollars, which he and Joey took to a McDonald’s a few blocks away. They came back with a couple bags full of stuff off the dollar menu. The four of them ate everything like the pack of wolves they were.

After 24 hours stuck in it, the hotel room was a lot less fun. They ended up watching Maury and ripping pages out of the Bible to set on fire in the bathtub.

Terry came back at 4 am and ordered them all out of the room, ignored their questions, stomped around as if he hadn’t been gone at all. When Iggy tried to get him to open the trunk so he could put the backpack in, Terry just snarled that the trunk was full, and told him to get the fuck in the car. Mickey clutched the backpack on his lap the whole way back.

When they got home, Mandy was sitting alone on the floor in the living room, happily scooping peanut butter out of a jar and into her mouth with her little fingers. Mickey asked her where their mom was, and, in a sticky voice, Mandy said that she guessed mom was in the bathroom, but she hadn’t seen her today.

The door was locked when Mickey tried it. Terry was pissed at first when Mickey went and got him, but then after a few minutes of unanswered hollering, he kicked the door down.

Mickey’s mom was in the bathroom. She was also dead.

*

Illinois was so flat. Everything in the entire world was flat. It didn’t take long for Mickey to realize that Chicago was not really a part of the state it inhabited, that it was an entirely separate world that had nothing to do with the uniform ledges of corn that stretched for miles, or the broken-toothed, greening cemeteries that slouched through tangles of elm trees to stop right at the edge of the road. Chicago was teeming, a place of dirty fingernails and living in one extreme or another; Illinois was a smooth landscape of American flags and shrieking insects. Every single gas station and truck stop had a Subway restaurant attached to it. When mist settled into the dips of the shingled roofs, into the rustling clumps of foliage that were clustered into little rural towns, the whole state held its breath.

After Illinois, it became obvious pretty quickly that the entirety of Iowa was a festering shithole. It was somehow hotter and more humid than Illinois, like something in the atmosphere knew where the state line was; it felt kind of like traveling over unremarkable reddish skin, unaware that you were driving on Satan’s backside until you suddenly found yourself mired in his swampy asshole. Mickey had thought there was a lot of corn in Illinois. It turned out that he was wrong, that maybe he had never even seen corn before in his life compared to the acres and acres of cow feed stretching out to bump the horizon in good ol’ Iowa. Mickey kind of had to piss, but he was pretty sure that if he dared to pull over, a horde of feral demon children would emerge, howling, to claw him down into the enormous green death maze that had probably birthed them.

He did not at all want to think about how many spiders lived between all of those plants.

Since Mickey had no idea where he was going to begin with, aside from a vague goal of _away_ , a shivering of _west_ where his teeth rooted into his gums, his goal quickly became to Get The Fuck Out Of Iowa. He titled it like that in his head, letting the capital letters lend urgency to his mission. He followed exit signs until a benevolent blue sign with a little curling sun on it assured him that “Missouri Welcomes You”; he pulled off at the first gas station he saw, filled up the Jeep, pissed blissfully in a tiny, filthy bathroom, and bought some beef jerky with his fancy new debit card. It turned out that having a bank account was kinda convenient, despite what generations of Milkoviches had believed. His family had always been firmly of the stash-your-money-in-a-Pringles-can type—probably because there was never much money to begin with, and what there was had certainly not been acquired legally. Milkoviches didn’t trust banks, or anybody else, for that matter.

Missouri quickly gave way to Kansas. Mickey had been driving for over seven hours at this point; Kansas wasn’t so bad, actually, it was just that Mickey was getting bored. He hadn’t thought to find any CDs to take with him, and the radio played a steady stream of static no matter where he was. He had spent the last 45 minutes singing the only three verses of _American Pie_ that he knew, over and over and over.

Kansas was fucking flat, too, just in a different way. Sometimes the flat was dirt, sometimes it was a summery green, every once in a while there was a hill—he had actually seen one hill that was a _real hill_ , like on a desktop computer background or some shit, this massive swell of edgeless land bubbling out of sanded down nothingness. Mickey was also pretty sure that every insect on the planet lived in Kansas. His windshield was caked in multicolored splatters, and the grass at the rest area he stopped at vibrated and creaked with bugs.

Mickey finally quit for the night in Junction City. At least, that’s where he thought he was. Motel 6 was the only place he knew of that would rent rooms to people under 21, so he drove until he saw one, on the outskirts of town. He could have gotten out his fake ID, more worn than his real one by far, and stopped somewhere nicer. He didn’t. He knew that there was nowhere cheaper than a Motel 6, and a lifetime of poverty meant that he wasn’t going to spend more money than he had to, even if he could afford it for once. He went to check in, passed his card to the half-awake guy behind the glass window, and tried not to think about the other times he had stayed at a Motel 6.

It was drizzling when Mickey woke up the next morning. He didn’t have to look out the window to know; his stomach ached where it was pressed against the sheets, and, after a moment, he could feel faint warmth settling against his lower back—a spreading of fingers, maybe. A large, circling palm. Mickey shuddered out a breath. The worst part about this shit, he thought, was that sometimes it was almost nice.

Thunder rumbled, low and distant. Mickey rolled out of bed. There was no way he was getting caught in the middle of nowhere fucking Kansas, or unknowingly driving himself into a ditch somewhere with hours and hours of time unaccounted for. He threw himself in the shower for as long as it took to wash his hair, left the room key card on the dresser, and started coaxing the Jeep into outrunning the weather. There was a comforting tickle along the shell of his ear, and it had taken a couple of tries to steady his hands enough to put down the emergency brake.

Mickey wasn’t a stranger to shaky hands. His mom’s hands were always shaky. He remembered her touch in his hair, fluttery, inconsistent. His dad’s hands would get shaky after a day of marathon drinking, of using who knows what, thick fingers stumbling against metal or glass or the TV remote. His cousin’s hand had been shaking the day he gave Mickey his knuckle tattoos, which had seemed completely unfair, since Mickey was the one getting _Fuck U-Up_ permanently etched into his skin, and he had to keep _his_ hands still.

This morning, his hands were shaking. Mickey thought that it was probably because he was constantly fucking freaked out, and was on the run from something that seemed to actually live inside his skin, but it was also possible that the hand that had been smoothing down his back in the motel room was now in Mickey’s hands, twitching incongruently towards something distant and indefinable.

Mickey’s hands were shaking on the gas pump at the station a few towns over, on the sticky curve of the steering wheel while he pulled the Jeep up and parked it, on the flick and catch of his lighter’s wheel as he lit up a cigarette and leaned against the side of the Kwik-Stop/Subway combination overlooking the pumps. Subway still, even in fucking Kansas. If he was going to have to drive all over the damn country, and be terrorized, and eat nothing but fucking Subway, _and_ still have to be a person, the least he could do was have a fuckin’ smoke as a consolation prize.

“Hey, man. Could I get a light?”

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. Mickey glanced over to see an overgrown tangle of a man shuffling over to him, tapping a cigarette out of a crushed looking pack of smokes. No, Mickey thought, you cannot have a fucking light.

He offered his lighter anyway. The guy accepted it when Mickey handed it to him, and didn’t seem to notice that Mickey had almost fumbled the exchange. “Thanks. M’fuckin’ lighter quit on me,” he said, around a mouthful of orange filter. It only took the guy one try before the white end of the cigarette glowed with heat, miniature coals in an ant-sized campfire, and he handed the lighter back. “I went in an’ bought a new one from in there,” he continued, nodding toward the building they were standing next to, “but that fuckin’ thing wouldn’t work either, an’ there ain’t no way I’m goin’ back in to give them more of my money for some shit that don’t work.”

Mickey took a drag from his cigarette, tilted his head slightly in a way that most people wouldn’t be able to misconstrue as sympathetic. “Sucks, man.” He let the smoke stream out of his nose.

The guy didn’t seem to be most people, however, because he kept talking through a thick gray cloud that was comprised equally of smoke and wiry beard hairs. “Tell me about it. Last place I stopped was Dodge City, like three hours ago or somethin’. Didn’t know it was gonna be so damn hard to have a smoke, y’know?” He chuckled. “An’ me, on my way back from Colorado, too. Been smokin’ some shit a lot better than cigarettes last few days, and now I’ve crossed the border back into Kansas it’s like, even these regular-ass Marlboros want me to suffer.” Little puffs came out of the guy’s mouth along with his words. Mickey thought he looked kind of like a grizzled, hunching dragon. “Where you headed, anyway? You local?”

Mickey shook his head. He had almost smoked down to the filter, which would mean he could _leave_. “Nah. Drove out here from Chicago.” He dropped the butt on the ground, scuffed it out with his shoe. “Not really sure where I’m goin’, to be honest. Gotta get there, though, so,” he pointed meaningfully toward the parking lot with his thumb, started to back up to show that he wasn’t planning to hang around.

The guy nodded in enthusiastic dips that made Mickey’s head hurt just watching. Or maybe it didn’t, maybe it was the wind making his head hurt by blowing humid air, by helping infant storm heads curl outward into pregnant, sky-eating bruises. “Nice, man, road trippin’ it the old fashioned way, I like it. Hey, if you don’t got a direction, lemme suggest Colorado—you’re almost there anyway, an’ I can attest they got some good perks for their tourists, if ya catch my drift.” His accompanying grin was leathery and full of whiskers, dead grass spiking out of cracked dirt. Mickey raised a hand in thanks and hightailed it back to the Jeep before he had to engage in any more conversations.

Colorado wasn’t a bad idea, though. That was west, right? When people talked about west, southwest, whatever, Colorado was the first state that seemed to qualify, wasn’t it? And anyway, if anyone deserved to get truly fuckin’ high, it was Mickey, after the month he’d had.

The next time he stopped, Mickey bought a stack of CDs from the stand next to the register at the gas station. Tension inched out of his body in increments as he drove, but it was unbearably quiet in the Jeep. After months of lonely silence in his house, a year without Mandy’s sly, gibing chatter, after hours and hours by himself in the car and all of the blank hours before that, where he had been living and moving without having any memory of it afterwards, Mickey was done. He was so, so tired of quiet.

He thought he could probably make it across most of Colorado that day if he tried. If he had to. There was a part of him that thought maybe, maybe, this would be it, that one of his stops that day could last for a little while. _West_ was awfully vague, and he wasn’t sure how he would know when he had gotten there.

It was easier to know when he had crossed the state line, because there was a convenient wooden sign to tell him. _Welcome to Colorful Colorado!_ Mickey wasn’t sure that Colorado was the kind of state that could be trusted; it didn’t seem any more colorful than Kansas had been, at least not at first.

Colorado was expansive. It seemed to be everything at once: green, and brown, and level, until, for the first time in his life, Mickey found himself in the mountains. Here, there was color, as advertised. The roads twisted and curved in ways that were difficult to anticipate, corkscrewing through the reaching silhouettes of sheer rock, the ragged carpet of dark green pine trees. Sometimes, the landscape out one window would drop away into a steep, deadly mountainside, corralled only by a guardrail. The hazy, soft valleys below stretched languidly between the scooped-out slopes and the mountains in the distance. The horizon was nonexistent. Instead, the earth’s blue bones cut shapes into the sky, serrated in places, time-softened in others, stacked in overlapping layers that faded from midnight to navy to powder blue as they receded.

There were streams and rivers and trickles of water that were probably all part of the same water source, just stretched and pressed over distance. Little multicolored wildflowers poked up along the shoulder and out of cracks in the mountain’s face. Waterfalls sprung unbidden from holes in the rock, which glittered wetly under the attention. Once, Mickey stopped to piss; he hiked a little way up a trail, and when he came back, there was another car pulled over near his. It was a hipstery-looking Subaru, and the couple it had spit out was busy a few yards away, hanging their arms over a ledge and giggling. Upon closer inspection, Mickey realized that they were feeding handfuls of trail mix to an enraptured audience of chipmunks.

There were a lot of road signs in the mountains. Every three seconds it seemed like the speed limit was changing, slowing to accommodate a curve or speeding up after one was over. There were signs warning about falling rocks, signs warning about deer and elk that might want to cross the road, signs predicting passing lanes, and signs illustrating the squiggling road patterns that approached.

When Mickey rolled his window down, the air outside was cool and smelled like honey.

The sun was setting. The signs and flowers and boulders, the pillowed clouds in the sky, were all edged in biting, neon orange. Flooded between were pools of pink; pastel ripples lapped at the orange and bled into it in persuasive tendrils. The colors lingered, as if confirming the sign Mickey had seen hours before: _look. We meant it. Don’t doubt us again._

Night came slowly, dramatically, rising from the day’s flashy exit like a burlesque dancer teasing off her robe. When revealed, the naked dome of stars was painful in its hugeness, its clarity. It gripped Mickey’s chin and forced him to look. With a flash of unease, he remembered sitting on the porch all those weeks ago, body numbed and dizzy from getting fucked up, watching a little light trace lines in the sky. Out here, it was easy to understand how the stars might have the power to do that, to uproot themselves, to speak across time in ruler-straight code.

When the mountains finally fell away, they opened into farmland—not the farmland of Illinois or Iowa, but hay and cows and garden patches and orchards, all hemmed in by the distant Rockies. The dark crept down into the wide, settled bowl between the mountains and draped its velvet over everything. 65-mile-per-hour speed limit signs were amended by commands posted directly below them: _NIGHT 55 October 1— June 1._ Whatever. Even if it weren’t still September, Mickey wouldn’t drop his speed. He had places to be, probably.

Mickey was tired, tired. His skin itched. He drove until he was in some unidentifiable town, and then pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot. He purposefully positioned himself near the biggest cluster of cars, hoping that the company would make the Jeep look less suspicious. It would definitely be sitting in the same place for a lot longer than it took to get in and out of a store. After sticking the keys in his pocket, he crawled into the back and curled himself around his unimpressive pile of possessions. It wasn’t even a tight fit; for the first time in his life, Mickey felt grateful for being so fucking short. He pulled the crocheted blanket over himself and buried his face in the side of his duffle bag. Hopefully he could get a few hours of sleep before someone made him leave.

It was hard, in moments of stillness like that, in the quiet, not to think that maybe he was actually just batshit fucking crazy. Mickey took stock of his situation: he had just driven 12 hours across the country that day, 9 hours the day before, in a car that he had bought on impulse, after he had sold his family’s house without telling anyone. He was sick, somehow, in a way that meant that he was hallucinating and throwing up and getting migraines and _losing hours and hours of time_ while he—what, sleep-walked? Was possessed? The word possession had a ring of accuracy to it when he thought it, but Mickey knew better. He didn’t believe in the devil; at least, not outside of what people could be all on their own.

And here he was, outside of a fucking Wal-Mart, trying to sleep in the back of his car. Honestly, though, much stranger was the fact that somehow he had transformed into the kind of person who actually _owned_ a car. Who had a bank account. Who had been in Colorado for, what, like nine hours? And hadn’t bought any weed at all? Jesus fuck. If his dad were still alive, he’d probably disown him.

Mickey thought it said a lot about his upbringing (or lack thereof) that his first instinct when all of this shit started up hadn’t been to go to a doctor. Never once had he considered visiting a shrink, or even going to the fucking clinic. Instead, he had listened to the creepy little voice in his body and sold all his shit, skipped town, and drove off like he had something to run from. It would make way more sense in the narrative of Mickey’s life if he _were_ running from something, he thought. Becoming a fugitive at some point was never out of the question, not with the way he lived, not with the shit his family did. But he wasn’t running away. He wasn’t in hiding. He was going somewhere.

Mickey dreamed.

 

 

In the dream, he was warm. Not hot, or stifled or claustrophobic, but—god, he hated to even think it, but _cozy_. What a stupid word. But that’s how he felt. Sidled up to, nestled into, surrounded. Comfortable. The feeling moved minutely around him, settling, compressing and releasing, burrowing and inching away. In the dream, he opened his eyes and saw the inside of the Jeep, but morning sun was filtering through the tinted windows. It caught on the dark thread stitching his duffle bag together, on the creased edges of the few cardboard boxes he had packed, on the red and black and orange yarn that looped together to form his blanket. There was water beading on the outside of the windows, because somehow, it was also raining. He felt fingers sifting through the longer hair on top of his head, trailing across the short hairs on back, coming to rest against his neck; the fingers were soft, grasping, accompanied by a warm palm pressed against the rounded edge of Mickey’s jaw. There was no one else in the car. He hadn’t thought there would be.

He closed his eyes. Even while dreaming, it was easier that way. He couldn’t help but sigh, just a little. It felt nice, but also someday he would like to not be in the car anymore. He was tired of being in the car. He was tired.

He heard a low chuckle by his ear—heard, not felt, which was different. Mickey’s eyes flashed open, just for a second, to make sure he was still alone. He was.

“You’re asleep,” the voice said. “How can you be tired if you’re sleeping?” It was low, amused, like the laugh had been. The sound scraped goose bumps up Mickey’s arms, and he couldn’t tell if they were from fear or from stupid, stupid appreciation. Either way, Mickey was annoyed.

“Yeah, well, when you’ve had the kind of month I’ve had, you’d be fuckin’ surprised,” Mickey replied. He wasn’t certain that his mouth was moving.

“Sorry,” the voice said, and it did sound sorry. “It’s complicated, trying to talk to you. I’m not really…uh, supposed to be here. I don’t have that long, but I thought I should at least try, y’know?”

“I have no fuckin’ clue what you’re talking about,” Mickey started, then broke off. There was a thumb brushing against his cheek, steady and light. He had to work to keep his breathing even.

“Sorry,” he—whoever he was—said again. Whispered, this time. Mickey could feel the breath of it against his forehead. “Is this bad?”

_No_ , Mickey thought traitorously, _no no it’s not bad don’t move don’t_ “What’s bad is running all over the goddamned world, half the time not knowing what the fuck is going on, throwin’ up in my fuckin’ kitchen, gettin’ dragged to Chuck-E-Cheese and Iowa and every other shithole place in this country. I mean, come the fuck on, I know you’ve probably never been to Iowa, but you gotta trust me when I say it wasn’t that great.”

“Sorry.” _Sorry, sorry._ A nose against his nose, barely.

“I’m already here. I’m doing this. I sold my fuckin’ house, man. It’s a little late for sorry.” Secretly, though, Mickey appreciated it. Damn right, he was owed an apology. “I gotta ask, though—where am I going? _West_ isn’t exactly a map, and I’m real fuckin’ sick of being in the car.”

“Oh, yeah—shit, sorry.” _Sorry._ “I don’t know this place the way you do. I just—I know we need to be in the desert somewhere. I don’t…I think you’ll know where it is when you get there? I wish I could’ve asked Lip more, but he would’ve figured out what I was doing, and I can’t—” He stopped speaking, like he’d been cut off. Mickey could feel the cocoon of warmth pulling away. “I gotta go, okay?” A hand through his hair again, but this time it didn’t linger. Breath against his forehead. “I gotta go. I’ll try to come back.” He paused. “Thanks, for all of this.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mickey grumbled. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted whoever—whatever—it was to come back. He thought he probably did.

 

 

There was tapping on the window. When he opened his eyes it was dark still, darker than it had been when he fell asleep. All of the warmth from his dream was gone; the nighttime chill crept easily through the many small gaps in the crocheted blanket and greeted him without sensitivity.

The tapping came again, and at first Mickey thought it was rain, until a muffled “Sir?” followed it.

Mickey groaned. Fuck. “Hang on, I’m comin’,” he called, struggling to his knees. He clambered over the center console and into the driver’s seat, then cracked the door open. “Yeah?” His voice sounded groggy. He could smell his own sweat when he moved.

He could make out just enough details about the woman outside the car to tell that she was wearing some kind of uniform, but that she wasn’t a cop. Thank god. He fucking hated cops. She waved a hand at him tentatively, then took a step back when she saw him leaning his head out the door. “I saw you laying back there and I couldn’t tell—I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Mickey ran a hand over his face. “M’good. Been driving all day, had to pull over and sleep for a while.”

She nodded. “Sorry for waking you up. I’m an EMT, and past experience tells me that they’re not always sleeping, so. I had to check.”

“I get it. Better you wakin’ me up than the cops, anyway.”

“Tell me about it.” She walked away, back to what he assumed was her car. “Have a good rest of your night.”

Yeah, right. Mickey pulled the door closed and let his head fall back against the headrest. He checked his phone—3 am, which meant that he’d slept for about 3 hours. Enough time to dream some weird shit, not enough time to feel any less exhausted.

He turned the car on, and moved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has given this story a chance so far! I plan to update once a week, on Wednesdays, so look for new chapters then.
> 
> Feel free to yell at me in the comments! I'm also on tumblr as [sentimentalspiders](https://sentimentalspiders.tumblr.com/).


	3. Chapter 3

The desert was somewhere you lived if you were in the witness protection program, Mickey decided. He had stopped at a rest area to sleep for a few more hours, then passed through the last small Colorado town, drove through the Four Corners, and found himself faced with jack shit. He had seen a for-real fucking tumbleweed, barreling across the road, just doing its thing. He had seen hungry-looking horses running in herds in places where there were no fences. He had seen “towns” that consisted of a few ramshackle trailers, a gas station/laundromat combination facing across from a rival gas station/Burger King combination, and nothing else. 

He had seen a coyote chasing through a flock of crows, seemingly just for the fun of it. What was it that a flock of crows was called? A murder? Mickey thought that when a coyote was involved, the whole group should be called something even more sinister. It should be _called_ a sinister. That sounded about right.

The desert had that same honeyed smell that the mountains did, but instead of being buoyed by the ever-present scent of rain, it was tamped down by thick dust. Everything was so dry. Mickey wondered if it ever rained out here at all. Maybe not. He had complicated feelings about that, about whether or not he was interested in living in the protection that a dry climate might offer. Even a couple weeks ago the answer would have been an adamant _yes_ , but now he wasn’t so sure.

Mickey had had this idea of the desert in his head, where there were a lot of cactuses and cowboy hats and like, maybe a little white church where a demon lived. So far, he didn’t think he had seen any of that stuff. Mostly there was just brown, topped with little clumps of brittle green, and the occasional yellow sprig of an insistent flower.

The rock formations were cool, at least. At first there were just mesas—mountains that looked like their tops had been leveled off to make tables for giants—but then these sharp, bulbous red turrets started jutting up at random, looking out of place and impressive because of it. New Mexico was a buried beast with only its claws breaking through the earth’s surface.

Cliffs made of stripes and wind-worn caves lined the sides of the road in Arizona. When they gave way they formed valleys that looked like boiling pots of sandstone; rounded orange rocks dipped and bubbled and made deep red shadows in the creases, let themselves go blue with atmospheric perspective near the horizon. The world, Mickey thought, was a weird fucking place.

As he drove, Mickey thought about his dream. It seemed obvious that the—person? entity?—in the dream was the same one that had been fucking with Mickey’s head, making him sick, pushing him to leave. It was clear in the way that every time—he? it?—gave Mickey travel directions they were basically useless, but also in the familiar warmth of invisible contact, the kindness of that not-palm pressed against his skin.

If Mickey was honest with himself, which was not something he liked to be, the part where sometimes the nice side effects outweighed the shit ones was probably the reason he was so unconcerned about abandoning his life. There wasn’t much he cared about in Chicago anymore, if anything. But maybe at the end of this trip, there would be something that cared about him, or at least needed him enough to pretend that it did. That didn’t sound like a bad thing to have. It didn’t sound like a bad thing to want.

Mickey’s prior relationship experience was limited to fucking around in alleys outside of clubs, and occasionally hooking up with other South Side dudes who were Definitely Not Gay in the same way that Mickey was Definitely Not Gay. He had a pretty good idea of what he liked, though he’d never been with anyone who was very good at any of it. He had never been kissed. He had never allowed it. Fucking was fucking, but kissing was something else, something that he had never cared to have.

But when he thought about sprawling alone at his house, heated and teased to bursting by some unseeable force, about words making themselves in his tongue, about dream-breaths against his forehead—well. That was something else, too.

All of those months alone had screwed Mickey’s brain up. He was thousands of miles away from home, driving into the desert, all because some kind of fuckin' storm-ghost that got him off occasionally had told him to do so. He was seriously fucked in the head.

Driving was boring. All of the CDs from the gas station sucked, and he had listened to each of them at least once, so he knew. Mickey figured that if the whole cross-country road trip thing alone didn’t prove that he had immense willpower, the fact that he hadn’t skipped a single song on any of those god-awful albums definitely did.

He drove, and drove, and somewhere around hour four, he decided that he was not interested in another full day of aimless motion. It seemed like it had been years since he had seen a city, or a town, or even one of those scrappy water towers that some weatherproof idiot had painted a sun mural on. Like Arizona needed any extra suns. It took another hour and a half of driving before he hit somewhere that seemed real; there were streets, paved ones with houses, and there was a long, low-slung grocery store, and there were restaurants in the plural. He pulled off at a Maverick to get some gas, and marveled at the feeling of pavement beneath his shoes.

The pump did its work, and the smell of gas made acid rise in the back of Mickey’s throat, and he leaned back against the hot driver’s side door and stared blankly across the street. There was a peeling white building that looked like it sold tacky souvenirs, an insurance agency, a pizza place, and an unidentifiable red building, all attached in a line along one block of the main street. Mickey squinted his eyes at the red building. There was something written above the windows in a neat, golden font. The Alibi Room, maybe?

While he was examining the building, a stumbling group of men poured out of its door, trailing smoke and holding beer bottles. Mickey could hear the loud shape of their conversation from across the street, the unconcerned din made by a group of career alcoholics spending a successful day on the job. Mickey was familiar with the type. This was the thing, though: the presence of drunk people meant that the Alibi Room was a bar, which meant that Mickey could go across the street and also be a drunk person if he felt so inclined.

The machine asked him if he wanted a receipt. He didn’t. What he wanted was to have a drink in his hand, preferably as soon as possible. Mickey got back in the car, and drove it across the street and around the block to where there were slanted parking spots lining the road. He was so not used to having a car; when he got out, he checked twice to make sure that every door on the Jeep was locked and that the windows were rolled up. Years of being the kind of person who might steal a car made Mickey feel pretty sure that having a car and parking it out of sight meant that it was going to get stolen. He had to remind himself that Assfuck, Arizona or wherever he was at was not Chicago, and that it was probably too fuckin’ hot for grand theft auto, anyway.

The writing on the red building did indeed say The Alibi Room, right above thick, square windowpanes checkered blue and black and green. Mickey pushed open the door. The inside walls of the place were paneled in wood, and the floor was crowded with tables and booths and a pool table. The bar was a sleek, curving thing made of polished wood, but Mickey was much more interested in the stools pushed in front of it, the glasses sweating on top of it. He could tell that the after-work rush was just starting to trickle in, so he claimed a seat at the bar before they could all be taken. He dragged a hand over his face once, then again, because he couldn’t quite tell if he had felt it the first time.

“Hey, man, what can I get you?” Mickey looked up to see a giant of a man, broad in a muscled way, with kind eyes in a hard-planed face. This was a seriously big dude. Mickey had a brief, unbidden thought that his cock was probably—but nope, _nope_ , Mickey did not want to be having those kinds of thoughts about a man with a goatee and a ponytail. Definitely not.

“Uh, beer.” The guy reached over to fill up a glass from the tap, then turned to set it down. He didn’t even bother to card Mickey.

“So—” the guy started, but then he was cut off by someone further down the bar yelling “Kev!” in an obnoxious voice. He rolled his eyes. “Alright, hold your horses, Tommy,” the man—Kev—called back, then filled another glass and headed down the bar. Mickey took a drink of his beer; it wasn’t great, but nobody ever drank beer because it tasted good. The array of bottles along the wall behind the bar glittered charmingly at him, a reminder that hard liquor worked faster.

As if summoned by the thought, Kev returned and slid a shot glass full of sharp-smelling amber liquid across the counter to Mickey. “On the house,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but you look like shit. Just, like, straight up week-old garbage. For real. Like you got abducted by aliens, or something.” Kev stopped, mouth falling open and eyes glazing for just a second before snapping back to Mickey. “You haven’t been abducted, have you?” He lowered his voice and leaned in seriously. “You know, I hear those grey guys have metal and satellites and shit, and if you get abducted, they put it all up your ass.”

Mickey snorted a laugh—except all of a sudden it wasn’t that funny. Something in his stomach iced over at Kev’s words: _You haven’t been abducted, have you?_ Mickey’s mind helpfully provided him with images of lights in the sky, of waking up in cars and at bus stops with no memory of getting there. Wasn’t missing time supposed to be a sign of…of something? It all rang true. Fuck. Mickey laughed again, but weaker this time. _Fuck_. “Who even knows? I bet them aliens are tricky motherfuckers, wouldn’t count it out.”

Kev nodded sagely, and pointed at Mickey like he had said something wise and resonating. Mickey picked up his shot glass and tipped it back. The liquor burned on the way down, lighting up his throat and sinuses, and his stomach lurched at the taste—whiskey, then, and the cheap shit, something he’d definitely gotten plastered off of before. The heat chased off some of his horror, though it didn’t do anything for the knot forming in his gut.

Kev refilled a few glasses, then produced a dirty looking rag and wiped around the small puddles of spilled beer that glistened on the bar. He glanced at Mickey again; Mickey knew he was a mess, blue eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, hair sweaty and unkempt from being in the car, patchy stubble struggling to exist on his round chin. The last time he’d used the bathroom at a gas station he had looked in the mirror, and his resemblance to a dead fish had made him crack a grin. If his face had been puffy and pale a few hours ago, Mickey couldn’t imagine that it had improved with time.

“So you from around here? Usually we just get the same crowd at the Alibi, not many tourists here or anything. We aren’t near enough to the Grand Canyon or Havasu or any other shit like that to be a touristy kind of town.” Kev was determined to have a conversation, then. Alright, whatever.

“Nah, man. I’m from Chicago.” Mickey paused to take a drink. He took his time swallowing, dragging his thumb along his bottom lip to collect the stray drops of beer, considering what he was going to say next—just to make sure it was true. He took a breath. Raised his eyebrows. “I’m thinkin’ about stayin’ in the area, though.”

That brought Kev’s eyebrows up, too. “Really? That’s cool. Hot as balls out here, though.” He poured some vodka, and passed it down to a guy who looked like he didn’t need any more vodka. “You got somewhere to stay already?”

Mickey shook his head, a slow tilt one way and then the other. “Kind of a spur of the moment thing, y’know? Haven’t really had a chance to look around yet. Guess I’ll just crash at a motel for a couple days until I figure it out.” He didn’t say that he had just _now_ decided that he was going to stay. The place qualified as desert, and there was a bar, and that was good enough for him regardless of any… _other_ opinions there might be about where he should live.

Kev laughed, loud and sudden. “Well—hey, what was your name again?”

“Mickey.”

“Well, Mickey, I think that the baby Jesus is looking out for the both of us today.”

Mickey’s eyebrows climbed higher. “And how is that?”

“You need a place to live.” Kev spread his hands, as if he was laying out his words like a physical thing. “And I, my friend, happen to have a rental property in need of a tenant.”

“A rental property, huh?” Mickey drained his glass, then rolled it between his hands. “What exactly does that mean?”

Kev shrugged. “Well, I mean, it’s a trailer. And it’s in my backyard. But my backyard is big, I promise! The guy who owns the Alibi used to live in there, but he was old—and I mean _old_ , like all crusty and Alzheimery, it was awful, but I was the only one taking care of him and it wasn’t working out. Anyway, he’s in the nursing home, and now I have this trailer that no one is living in. See my problem?”

“What kinda numbers we lookin’ at?”

“Uh, I don’t know the square footage right off hand, but—”

“No, I mean how much _money_? As in rent?”

“Oh.” Kev scratched at his nose, thinking. “Probably like $450 a month? That’ll do utilities too, since everything’s already hooked up to my accounts. And I guess a deposit? How much are deposits, like 100 bucks or something?” He frowns. “I guess I shoulda asked if you had money first, huh?”

Mickey quirked an eyebrow in agreement, but he wasn’t going to comment on Kev’s scattered offer. He needed a place to live, and here was one presented to him within an hour of being in town. _I think you’ll know where it is when you get there_. “Don’t worry, I got money. My dad died a few months back and I sold his house before I drove out here.”

Kev raised both arms in the air and made a sound that was either a sigh or a Sasquatch call. “Oh, thank God, that’s fantastic. I mean, not fantastic that your dad’s dead, that’s not cool. But I was gonna feel like a real jackass if I had to take back my offer, you know?”

“Don’t worry about it. And my dad was an asshole, so don’t worry about that either.” Mickey set his beer glass down. “Look, I can write you a check as soon as you got a lease for me to sign. I’m not about to be picky, whatever you got for me is gonna be better than livin’ out the back of my car. 550 bucks, first month’s rent and the deposit. That sound right?”

“Dude, that’s so awesome.” Kev swiped the glass. “I might need a couple days to get the place cleaned up, if that’s alright. You want another beer?”

Mickey shook his head. “Nah, I’m good. Gotta drive still.” He pulled out a few bucks for the drink, then took his keys out of his pocket and swung them around on his index finger, the one with the letter _K_ tattooed on the knuckle. “I should probably head out. I’ll drop by in a couple days to sign that lease, yeah?”

“Yeah, no problem. Hey, thanks so much, dude. Mickey. Talk later, man.”

Mickey left. His car was still there, which was a nice surprise, and he had had just enough to drink that his insides felt pleasantly warm. He almost wished that it was raining; he felt light, good, like he’d made progress, and he wanted…he _wanted_. He slid into the driver’s seat and allowed himself a moment to imagine a hand on his hip, broad and dry, fingers trailing up his side and across his stomach, another person pressed against his back with a leg wedged between his legs. No, not a person. Not necessarily a person. Maybe a person?

He didn’t know at all.

*

Some people were just lucky. Mickey had known countless low-lifes back home who should have been in prison ten times over, but had never spent more than a night in a cell, all because they were plain lucky. There were people who lived in red brick, ivied palaces and flew first class to the Italian coast every winter, and they did this because they had never wanted for money, and neither had their parents, or their parents’ parents, and they lived like that because they were lucky. Mickey had stolen shit from enough vacated summer homes to know luck when he saw it.

Mickey had never considered himself lucky. His life was closer to a crime drama than a fairy tale; he had grown up surrounded by people selling drugs and guns, people who kept the best cuts of both to use themselves. His house had always seemed to remain standing only by the sheer volume of people living in it. Teenaged Mickey had grown up closeted in the South Side with a dead mom and a bigoted dad, a whole litter of siblings who always took care of themselves first, and a resume that began with pushing drugs and ended with breaking and entering. He had been to juvie three times. He had grown up the kind of poor that meant he never, ever felt bad for the people he was scamming, because even after he was done, those people were still better off than he was.

Here was the thing: a few miles out of town, off of paved roads and onto dirt, Mickey started to feel like his luck was changing. Kev’s place was fifteen minutes away from the motel Mickey had spent two nights at, and he had started to wonder if he was being led out into the desert to be murdered when Kev’s van finally turned onto a narrow stretch of rutted ground that apparently counted as a road. The house wasn’t far down. It was a one-story stucco creation painted a chipping red. Several faded chairs were crammed onto the front porch, along with a precarious stack of produce boxes that seemed to be leaking papers and bottles and other miscellany onto the ground. Kev hadn’t been lying about the size of his backyard; if Mickey had to guess, Kev probably had a couple acres of land, and a set of faint tire tracks passing by the house led out to the middle of the lot where Mickey could see the rectangular silhouette of a mobile home.

The van’s brakes screeched as Kev pulled into his spot outside the house. Mickey pulled up behind him, and rolled the window down when he saw Kev getting out of the van and heading toward him. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Kev leaned his elbow against the open window. “Look, I gotta get back to the Alibi soon, but this is the place. Everything should be all hooked up out there, there’s already some furniture inside, but feel free to settle in, put your stuff wherever, it’s all good.” Kev passed a key through to Mickey. “This is for the trailer. Uh, if you need to do laundry, I have a washer and dryer in the house, just let me know when you need to use it. Or there's a laundromat in town, might be a better choice. If you have any questions, just…shoot me a text, I guess?”

“Sure thing.” Mickey pressed the key into his hand. The metal teeth bit into the fleshy pillow of his palm, and he was glad for the feeling. “So can I just head over, or…?”

“Yeah, I mean, I can’t think of anything else.” Kev knocked twice on the roof of the Jeep. “I’ll catch you later, man.”

“See ya. Thanks again.”

Mickey took the Jeep down that little, uncertain path. He felt like he was covering it up by driving on it, like in movies where someone on the run has to scrape snow over their footprints to keep from being followed. The moving tires stirred the dirt into a sheet; it hung in the air, a specter shifted from its grave, and then settled back into a new pattern on the ground to wait for its next resurrection.

Turning the key to the trailer felt a little bit like a resurrection in itself, or maybe like stepping into a crypt. The weak light straining through the windows turned the dusty air into glitter; it lit on a small living room, a lumpy green couch, a tiny box TV. Mickey slid his duffel bag onto the floor. To the right of the living room was a kitchen. It was pseudo-separated from the rest of the space by two wooden cabinets hanging from the ceiling and a stretch of counter rising from the floor, stalactites and stalagmites designating the entrance to a cave. Mickey could see a small fridge, a smaller oven, and a sink. To the left of the living room was a narrow hallway that, upon further inspection, led to a closet-sized bathroom and a bedroom that wasn’t much bigger. He made a mental note to replace the mattress on the full-size bed in the room; he didn’t really want to sleep somewhere that had almost certainly been pissed on by some old dude.

Mickey spent the afternoon bringing in his few belongings and fucking around with the swamp cooler wedged in the kitchen window. He went back into town and got some groceries, a purchase that mostly consisted of mac and cheese, toilet paper, and several fans for the places that the swamp cooler didn’t reach. He also stopped and bought a new mattress; it set him back about 150 dollars, and it would’ve been more if not for a fortunate combination of sales, but he figured it was worth it to sleep on a bed that had never been jacked off into by a geriatric. Mickey had to keep reminding himself that he actually had money to spend on things like mattresses and food.

It was an adjustment, getting used to traveling twenty minutes to get anywhere. He ached a little bit for his neighborhood, for the kids and the drunks camping out under the L, for the convenience of getting anything he wanted for the right price, even for bitch-ass Kash and how he looked the other way whenever Mickey stopped by to do a little “shopping”. Back home, mac and cheese wouldn’t have cost Mickey a dime. He missed the respect—well, really, the fear—that would bloom in others when they realized that his last name was Milkovich. He missed being in control.

In a way, he guessed that his recent actions counted more towards taking control of his life than remaining in that empty house would have. He had decided to move to the middle of nowhere. He had decided to leave Chicago. Or, well, it had kind of been his own decision to leave Chicago.

The desert was so quiet. Limitless. In the dark, the ground was defined by tufts of sagebrush nosing at his shoes, at his ankles. The sky was a black, sequined veil; the moon squinted through it in a glowing crescent, the whites of an eye rolled back in divination, watching the world and its future and its past. While he smoked, Mickey could hear wind hushing above him, too high to hit any of the still sun-hot creatures below. There were crickets creaking around him. They hid everywhere but under his feet.

The old mattress leaned against the only empty wall in the trailer, which was in the kitchen. He had already dragged his new mattress into the room; however, it wasn’t until he was stripped to his boxers that he realized he had neglected to buy sheets. Also, pillows. He chose to ignore both of these things, balled his crocheted blanket up into a lump that somewhat resembled a pillow, then collapsed facedown onto the bed. He almost groaned at how good it was, laying flat in a place he wouldn’t have to move from in a day or two days, not being in a car at all.

Mickey was glad he was exhausted. He hadn’t heard a police siren or a laughing neighbor in the entire time he’d been in his new home, and he could tell that the silence was going to fuck with his head. He wished, briefly, for another person—for Mandy and her shitty, bass-heavy music, her screeches and jeering insults as he beat her ass at Grand Theft Auto. For the house down the block, throwing a rager at 3 am on a Monday. For someone to slip against his back and breathe, to listen when Mickey said, “Fuck, it’s hot tonight,” and then that person would get up and get Mickey up with him, and they would go sit on the ugly green couch where the cooler could get to them. For someone to talk about nothing and laugh into his neck and distract him enough that the homesick knot in his gut would go away.

*

It had been three weeks since Mickey had seen rain. It had been three weeks since Mickey had seen fuck-all anything, honestly. He was frequently finding himself to be overheated and pissed off, and there was no question left in his mind that he was fucking stupid. There had been nothing, nothing, from Mickey’s— _correspondent,_ or whatever, in all the time since he had picked his spot and stayed in it, and Mickey was beginning to look around at his situation and realize that what he had done was insane.

It was becoming increasingly difficult for Mickey to find ways to spend his time—or, in other words, he was fuckin’ _bored._ The little TV seemed to only pick up three channels with any consistency: QVC shopping, mega-church sermons, and the Food Network. He was certain that Kev was stealing someone else’s cable rather than paying for it himself, so having any options at all was probably some kind of miracle, but still. There were only so many episodes of _Beat Bobby Flay_ that a person could watch before hoping that someone would go on the show with a baseball bat and some fuckin’ brass knuckles and get the job done right.

Mickey was becoming irrational in his boredom. He had cleaned the trailer—actually _cleaned_ it—like four days in, complete with multiple trips into town to get cleaning supplies. In this process, he had discovered that the store closed at 8 pm, which was…really just beyond his understanding; while cleaning, the world had also decided to reveal to him that scorpions were real, and also that they hated him. He had made this discovery by opening the bathroom door and shaking one of the little fuckers off the ceiling and onto his own head.

Sometimes Mickey found himself in town, wandering for the sake of it. There wasn’t much to see. Often, he ended up back at the Alibi; at first it was just to drink, but eventually Kev started telling Mickey to make himself useful and wipe down tables or clean glasses. It was a testament to how aimless Mickey felt that he actually did it.

He couldn’t help but feel a kind of crawling disappointment when he thought about how everything was playing out. He was doing the same shit here that he had been doing in Chicago, sweating in a room with the lights off and letting his loneliness eat him from the inside out. The only difference was that in Chicago, he could leave the house and go somewhere familiar, amble out the door to harass druggies for the cash they owed him, or trek across town to a club, and find someone willing to stick his cock in their mouth. He could listen to the rain, the rain as it was before or the rain as he knew it now, and get sick around the feeling of someone else’s mouth trying to dig its way out of his body.

Mickey knew he had been clawing to get out of Chicago, but now he could barely recall the feeling that had driven him. From his vantage point in the future, it was hard to remember where past Mickey’s urgency had come from. It was like the difference between getting punched in the face, and looking at someone _else_ getting punched in the face; one was immediate, demanding, something that hurt now and was going to hurt tomorrow, and there was no choice but to feel it because it was _happening_. The other was a disinterested glance at a scene happening somewhere else, maybe a brief twinge from the muscle memory of the last time you had been hit, and then nothing.

At least in Chicago, Mickey had felt like he had options. Here, he had nothing but the scorpions and the fine, red dust.

Just as Mickey’s first month in Arizona was coming to a close, right at the edge of the kind of hopeless stagnation he wasn’t sure he could come back out of, he was given his first gift. It was this: in the desert, rain was rare, and because of this, rain was never just rain. In the desert, when it rained, it _flooded_.

He was driving, because he was always driving, wasn’t he, even now. Originally, he had left the trailer to go sulk at the Alibi, but at the last minute the thought of Kev’s judgmental smile made him drive on past. He ended up at the town’s tiny movie theater, which consisted of two screens that only got movies a month after they had already been through other theaters. There wasn’t anything good in. Mickey briefly considered buying a ticket for whichever movie sounded the least shitty, but a lifetime of poverty rendered him incapable of spending money on something he knew he would hate. A lifetime of sneaking into movie theaters suggested that he wait for a crowd and duck in with them, but god, that sounded like a lot of work for something he didn’t really want to do in the first place. Mickey’s solution was to sit in his car instead of going anywhere, and stare at the greying evening with a kind of blankness that might have scared him if he still had it in him to be scared.

The lightning was the first cue that something was about to go down. The initial flash was only a flare of white light in Mickey’s peripheral vision. The second flash was enormous, a jagged, forking root system of fire tonguing across the bank of dark clouds that was the sky. Mickey hadn’t realized that the sky was like that. When had the sky gotten like that? He started the Jeep right as the air broke open with a sound like a mountain being cleaved in two by a hammer. _Crack_.

It was dark, dark. Not the black of night, or the livid wool of a thunderstorm, but the absence of light that came from one of these being layered over top of the other. There were no stars as Mickey drove out of town, no moon, only rain dropping onto the earth slow, then fast, then faster. There were no other headlights passing him on their way into town or following him on their way out. His windshield wipers beat, beat, beat, wiping away the muddy rain that meant that the wind was blowing hard enough to hurl dirt into the water while it was still air born. For the first time, he let his fingers skim with interest over the lever that would shift the Jeep into four-wheel drive.

Halfway between the town’s last light pole and the shallow ruts of Kev’s driveway, Mickey was given his second gift. It was this: a small, white blur up ahead, solidifying into a blob of something on the side of the road, solidifying into a pale expanse of human back, solidifying into knees and head and arms tucked loosely against torso. It was a man, unconscious or dead, damming up an over-full roadside ditch.

Mickey flipped on his hazards, and stopped the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day, if you're into that sort of thing! In case you're looking for a cool gesture to make for your significant other, I hear that heaving your body onto a rainy roadside and waiting for your SO to find you really does the trick these days.


	4. Chapter 4

The Jeep with only Mickey inside had felt strangely empty, like by being in it Mickey was cancelling himself out; once Mickey had hauled another person into the passenger seat, it was like a switch had been flipped. Suddenly the space was overflowing, all rain-slick limbs and windows fogging with the heat and breath of people propped against them, the air tense with Mickey’s panic.

Mickey didn’t know what to do. The thought had occurred to him that maybe he should head to a hospital, but when Mickey had heaved the guy’s mud-streaked, naked form out of the ditch and over his shoulder, he had thought better of it. His skin was warm, not cold or feverish from exposure; his breathing was even, brushing first against Mickey’s neck and then against the window; nothing on his body was visibly bruised or broken. The long, relaxed line of his throat, the slight parting of his mouth, the occasional drawing together of peaked brows, all seemed to suggest sleep rather than trauma or illness. Hospitals were fuckin’ expensive, and the kind of guys who passed out on roadsides were not usually the kind of guys who had insurance. Mickey knew that if someone ever carted _him_ to the hospital when he didn’t really need it, he would be fuckin’ pissed.

There was also a second, less rational thought in Mickey’s mind: he was the one who had found this guy, and allegedly, wasn’t he out here in the middle of nowhere because there was somebody—some _thing_ —that he was meant to find? It was more than even Mickey could manage, to look at an incapacitated stranger and wonder if his hand felt the way a dream hand felt, but Mickey reminded himself to think about it later when it seemed less like an invasion.

This person in his passenger seat was a kid, really. He couldn’t have been older than Mickey, but then, Mickey didn’t know if he was still a kid himself. They were matched in that way, at least.

Mickey drove back to the trailer. He scanned Kev’s house with sharp eyes, making sure that no one was peering outside to witness his arrival, before wedging his arms under slack legs and a solid waist, and making the stumbling trip through the downpour. It was not the easiest thing to unlock the door with his arms full, but he managed it, and got them both through the doorway with a scraped leg as the only casualty.

For a moment, Mickey thought about depositing his cargo on the couch, but, after maneuvering the door shut behind them, he headed to the bedroom instead. There was no unsavory ambition in this decision; the fact was that his bed was the closest comfortable surface to the bathroom, which contained three towels—great for drying things that had been rained on—and a toilet, for either throwing up in or pissing in, depending on the needs of the user. Mickey wasn’t too sure what this guy would need when he woke up, but Mickey’s past experiences with being unconscious had led him to believe that his guest might need to do one or the other at some point.

There was someone in his bed. How fucking weird was it that there was someone in his bed? And Mickey wasn’t even getting laid out of the deal. His eyes skimmed across the guy’s body, just for a second; he couldn’t help it, because, honestly, this person was nakedand he couldn’t _not_ look. There was just no way. If there was someone in front of you, you looked at them, right? Guiltily, Mickey flipped his eyes to the ceiling. He didn’t really want to look. He didn’t want to be like that. This whole situation was so fucked up.

Mickey kicked off his shoes. They went flying toward the bedroom door, and he sent his wet socks flapping after them. He then ducked out and into the bathroom, where he hastily removed his clothes and traded them for the dirty jeans and tank top that were lying on the bathroom floor, right where he had left them the previous night. In an impressive feat of multitasking, Mickey snatched a towel off of the sagging towel rack while also pulling his feet through the ends of his jeans; then, with one hand on his waistband and one clutching a scratchy handful of towel, Mickey stumbled back into the room.

Worry pricked at Mickey’s skull. It was weird that this guy hadn’t been woken up by the rain or the car or by being lugged from place to place. “Hey,” Mickey said, moving to the side of the bed. He held the towel hesitantly in front of him, a barrier against the whole scene. Should he use it to dry the dude off? That had seemed like the logical thing to do at first, but now, faced with the actuality of it, the idea seemed absurd. People didn’t do shit like that in real life, did they? “ _Hey,_ ” Mickey said again, louder this time, and kicked the box spring. “Wake the fuck up, man.” Nothing. It was bad that this guy hadn’t woken up. Fuck. He should have gone to a hospital. Mickey pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and chewed it.

Some people lashed out if they woke up to find someone touching them; Mickey himself was one of these people, so he kept his head tipped back awkwardly as he put his hand on the guy’s pasty shoulder. He shook it, fast, then ducked back just in case there was going to be a fist headed his way. There was no fist, only eyebrows pinching together, detectable in the dark only as a forehead shadow forming and narrowing, and then a little sigh that was punctuated by a shift in position from back to side. Mickey moved the towel from one hand to the other, indecisive, before finally lurching forward and passing it roughly from shoulder blade to thigh, then once across that glow-in-the-dark-white back. He then folded it up and stuffed it between the guy’s head and the pillow. Wet hair clung to Mickey’s hand as he did.

As an afterthought, Mickey wrestled the blanket out from underneath the weight holding it down and dragged it up, just far enough to cover everything below the waist. There was a person in his bed. Holy shit. A person who was…not dying, hopefully. Mickey pressed two fingers against an exposed stretch of the guy’s curving neck— _sternocleidomastoid_ , his brain supplied unbidden—and counted out a pulse in his head. Obviously the measurement wasn’t exact, but Mickey thought the pulse seemed fine. Normal. Not indicative of forthcoming health disasters.

Unsure of what else to do, Mickey retreated to the wall and slid down against it until he was sitting. He kept his eyes trained on the still form in his bed, and waited.

*

A fan whirred. The air it recycled smelled like sweat, the way sweat is when it has dried, when the sour smell has been diminished by its dryness. There was light, too, across Mickey’s face. It felt like a slap. Waking up with sunlight in his eyes always unlocked some small, inexplicable kernel of despair that stuck in Mickey’s throat when he swallowed. He tried to drag a hand over his face, but the thought never made its way out of his brain and into an action.

Briefly, Mickey had considered buying curtains for the small window in the trailer’s bedroom, but after the mattress, it had seemed stupid to spend money adjusting a space that felt so impermanent. He had more seriously considered tacking a blanket up over the window, like he had done with the window that lurked right near the headboard in his old Chicago bedroom, but he had no tacks and only one blanket, and, introducing another blanket to the tin toaster oven he lived in had honestly seemed like cruelty.

There were blinds twisted closed over the window, anyway, and the truth was that the blinds by themselves should have worked to keep out the sun. They had a specific job, and it was not Mickey’s fault that they weren’t doing it. He was not going to change anything, even if it meant he had to suffer. He shouldn’t have to fight the sun off. The sun was not his responsibility.

The sun…the sun hadn’t been there a second ago. Everything had been dark. Wet, too. He had been…fuck. Something like dread crept through Mickey’s chest. There had been something important happening, hadn’t there? Mickey took stock of his body and discovered that his legs were unpleasantly numb, his neck was bent against his shoulder, and his left elbow was achy and weighed down, like it had been in one position for too long. He realized that, despite the brightness irritating them, his eyes were not open.

Fuck. _Fuck._ He had fallen asleep.There was a reason that he was not supposed to fall asleep, and that reason— _that reason was in his bed_.

In a single ungainly seizure of movement, Mickey opened his eyes, staggered to his feet, and threw his heavy hands into fists. _FUCK U-UP_ , they said. One of Mickey’s knees tried to give out; his calf muscles prickled with the pain of coming back to life as he crashed into the wall behind him. How the fuck could he have let himself fall asleep?

Mickey’s eyes took a moment to focus, to remember what they were for. He was breathing heavily, a result of the kick of adrenaline that had roused him. When he could finally understand what he was looking at, Mickey realized that there was still a boy in his bed. A boy who was awake, and staring.

If his reviving limbs hadn’t felt like they were being set upon by a swarm of yellow jackets, Mickey might have physically recoiled at this realization. Instead, he stared back, and stared back, and then did what he was best at: he ran his mouth. “Looks like you’re not dead, huh?”

Light really added something to the whole scenario. Last night, Mickey hadn’t been able to tell much about this guy aside from the approximate weight and texture of his slack body. Now, in the sunlight, there was matted hair in an improbable shade of orange, an indented chin, a pink smudge of a mouth. Mickey watched in glorious technicolor as that mouth opened, then closed; he watched eyebrows furrow together in a reddish crinkle as a confused look spread across pale planes of face. Bizarrely, this was followed by a tongue sticking out, a little at first and then farther, a stubbornly set jaw working back and forth once the tongue had been withdrawn.

When a voice came out, it was hoarse, just a little. “You looked like…what’s that thing? With the legs?” Here, there was a pause, a closing of eyes. Mickey could see the pale tips of fingers skittering around under his pillow. “A spider,” he finished, opening his eyes again. “When you stood up.” His voice crackled, like it hadn’t been used much. Mickey recognized it anyway.

This time, when Mickey ordered his hand to drag across his face, it listened. He let one of his fingernails scrape a line down his cheek. “What the fuck,” Mickey said, more to himself than anything. “What the _actual fuck_.”

“I didn’t know what your face would be like.” That familiar voice was softer now, more in control of itself. He pushed himself up in Mickey’s bed, working towards a sitting position. “I didn’t know what you would look like.”

“You’re telling me,” Mickey demanded, “that you fucking stalked me for _months_ and you _didn’t know what I looked like_?” Mickey felt shivery, like his joints weren’t properly attached, like he wasn’t held together tight enough. There was anger and shock and something disgustingly like relief, a full glass spilling and shattering to pieces in Mickey’s chest, and it was all too much.

“You couldn’t see me either,” he pointed out. “My name’s Ian, by the way.” When he—when _Ian_ —smiled, it was a curious thing, a delicate inward purse of his mouth that split at the last second into a long, straight-toothed grin. It felt like a chemical reaction, something that required specific conditions to bubble into being, something that was in danger of not existing until it suddenly did.

The corners of Mickey’s own mouth ticked up, against his will. He turned his face in an attempt to hide it. “You come up with that name all by yourself?” A glance back at Ian showed that his face was still going full force. His bowed smile was bracketed by these dimpled, shadowy parentheses that Mickey thought he probably hated.

“Kind of, yeah,” Ian said, like naming himself was on the amusing side of normal. “I picked a name for my brother, too. Cool, right?”

“You’re an asshole,” Mickey said, instead of answering the question. “I have no fuckin’ clue what the hell else you are, but I know that you’re an asshole.”

It had been beyond Mickey’s imagination to picture the moment that _the thing_ would reveal itself to him in a form more concrete than a shiver or a dream. He had lit from scenario to scenario; in one, a stranger bought him a drink at the Alibi; in another, a stranger clapped him on the shoulder blade in line at the store; in yet another, he was mugged while smoking outside of some building or other, and in this scenario, the stranger stole his wallet and kicked him in the ribs and laughed because Mickey had shown up just to give himself away. Then Mickey started thinking that maybe this thing was actually a ghost, and that if they ever met in a real way the ghost would be reincarnated, but like, as a dog or something, and then Mickey decided to stop thinking about introductions.

The beginning had been hard to imagine, because there were so many possibilities and because it was all so unlikely anyway, but Mickey had an easier time skipping ahead to an ideal outcome. Sometimes it involved him going home with the stranger from the bar or the store; sometimes it was a detailed explanation of what exactly had _happened_ , free from all emotion except for a burning entitlement to the truth; sometimes it was vaguer, softer, hot breath laughing against his knuckle tattoos because _really_? and Mickey’s cheeks would burn with the effort of holding back a smile.

Somehow, none of Mickey’s predictions had involved 6 feet of freckled road kill wobbling to its feet like Ariel learning to walk for the first time, but here he was anyway. The crocheted blanket fell to the floor, useless, as Ian tentatively dragged his feet against the patchy carpet. Mickey averted his eyes, cursing under his breath. “You need to put some fucking clothes on, man. Seen enough of that shit to last me a lifetime.”

“Don’t have any clothes,” Ian replied, beaming. “How do I run this thing, anyway?” Here, he gestured ambiguously to his entire self. “I’ve never had a human body before.”

“Holy shit.” Mickey’s hand found his face again. He felt like slapping himself awake. “Oh my god. Okay. I need a fuckin’ smoke.”

Ian nodded, in a way that was more generally agreeable than specifically agreeing. “I think I need to pee. Where’s your bathroom?”

Better pee than vomit. Mickey grabbed his carton of Marlboros off of the little bedside table, then showed Ian the three steps to the bathroom. “If you get piss anywhere but in the toilet, I’ll make you lick it off the fuckin’ floor, you hear me? I am not cleanin’ that shit up just cause you don’t know how to operate your dick,” Mickey warned, then stomped into the living room.

Kev had never said if he cared about cigarette smoke in the trailer, but Mickey usually smoked outside anyway, mostly as an excuse to not be trapped inside all the time, but occasionally because he thought he might want his deposit back. Today, however, was not a day for caring about Kev’s interiors; today was a day for lighting one up as soon as possible, because Mickey just did not give a fuck about the real world at the moment. He heard the toilet flush—thank god, because there was no way he was about to have that conversation—and then Ian’s voice.

“Hey, so I—wait, where’d you go?”

It was a little endearing, and a lot fucking strange. This was happening. Okay. Mickey sucked in tobacco like his life depended on it, which it definitely didn’t, and retreated back down the hall.

“There you are!” Ian’s eyes lit up when Mickey came into view. “I was gonna ask you about clothes.”

Mickey raised his eyebrows. “You wash your hands?”

“Huh?”

“After you used the bathroom. Hands? Washing? There’s soap in there for a reason.”

Ian threw his head backwards in exaggerated exasperation. “I knew I was forgetting something! There are so many rules for all this, I don’t know how you keep everything straight.” He spun back into the bathroom, presumably to wash his hands.

Mickey almost said that he never kept anything straight at all, on principle, but he figured the joke would go over Ian’s head. Instead, he dug around in his duffel bag—which he had yet to unpack, as there was nowhere to unpack it into—and pulled out his baggiest pair of sweatpants and a bluish tank top that he thought might cover Ian’s long torso.

Ian came in, brandishing his dripping hands as evidence of his evolving hygiene. Mickey threw the clothes into them. “Alright, E.T. First, you get dressed. Then, you tell me _what the fuck is going on_.”

*

This, it turned out, was the story: Ian had run away.

Well, there was obviously more to it than that, but the center of the whole thing seemed to be that Ian was—not _on the run_ , exactly, but running.

Ian went into specifics about his brother, who was apparently some kind of genius. This brother, who Ian referred to as Lip—“Like Phillip, but I thought Phil was a stupid sounding nickname”—was a scientific type. A smart-ass, too, it sounded like; Mickey was glad he had ended up with this brother and not the other one.

Lip had always had a habit of fucking around with numbers and wires, building things and pushing the limits of what he could create, according to Ian. It was a hobby, until it really, really wasn’t. Lip’s experiments had turned into an outline for interdimensional space travel, for transmuting the forms of life on one planet into the bodies of another. It had turned into a position as the creator and head of an experimental “foreign exchange program” that was still in its early stages.

This was where things got weird.

Lip had decided to look into Earth as a possible sister planet. “Something about important biological similarities. I don’t really know. Personally, I think Lip just likes to look at human girls,” Ian explained wryly.

Going from one planet to another had taken a lot of research, understandably. Ian described years of recording information on languages, customs, and habits, of condensing the information into a course that could be played and learned in a matter of hours. He told it all through the lens of someone who had been privy to an overwhelming number of details, and who had understood very few of them. Ian had never been scientifically minded; he had simply been the only one Lip got along with well enough to talk to.

Lip had gotten all of his information through personal interviews with humans. He had managed this with a device he had pieced together, a sort of long-long-long distance telephone that only reached certain people under certain conditions. Those certain people, it turned out, were not particularly common, and were “genetically and spiritually” pre-tuned to the electrical, internal radio station Lip was reaching out on.

Essentially, the people Lip talked to needed to be able to hear him in their heads without their bodies fatally rejecting the invasion, and they needed to be able to believe what they heard. This was all much easier, Ian said, when things were charged. Amplified. So Lip waited for the air on Earth to become heavy with electricity. He waited for the storms to come, to make the sky a liquid and touchable thing.

This was what Ian had done, as well, though without permission or finesse. He had found Mickey as an inebriated, sparking mess of listless energy, idling in a Chicago August filled with rain, and had inexpertly reached out.

It had been almost too much for Mickey to handle. The throwing up and the migraines and the unwitting field trips, it was all the result of Ian, light years away, crawling and straining and whispering his way into Mickey’s mind. Manipulating him, Mickey couldn’t help thinking with a certain amount of bitterness, into becoming invested. Into selling his life and fucking off to the land of scorpions and Joshua trees, waiting around with his thumb up his ass for the exact moment Ian needed to be scraped off of the highway.

Mickey couldn’t help but feel used. Ian hadn’t cared what he had done to Mickey, as long as someone was there waiting when he arrived.

Ian had not told his family that he was leaving. He had not had the necessary training to use Lip’s equipment, because nothing was ready to be used yet. It had been nothing short of a miracle that Ian, a kid sneaking into his brother’s volatile workspace in off hours, had prepared himself to leave…and then left.

He didn’t seem to want to talk about his reasons for risking his life. For pushing at the delicate future of space travel in order to _go_ in the most dramatic, tremendous way imaginable. To Ian, it was enough that he was here.

Mickey did not think that was enough.

*

What was it to leave if you had something to leave behind?

Ian had family. Real family, family that cared about him, family better than the dumbshit, dope-head brothers Mickey had and never cared if he saw again. Ian’s decision was baffling to Mickey. It was nothing to skip town when the only people left behind were Iggy and Joey and Jamie. They had left him behind first. Mickey didn’t have people who loved him, not in the way that Ian had his siblings.

Except—well, Mandy. Mandy was Mickey’s family. Mickey didn’t know if he would be able to do to Mandy what Ian had done to his family. What Mandy had done to him.

Mandy had found something worth leaving for. Something worth taking off for, worth disappearing without a word, worth abandoning Mickey to the assholes they were related to. She and Ian would have so much to talk about, if they ever met.

Every time Mickey thought about his sister was an accident, because every time he thought about his sister, he missed her. They had always been each other’s only allies.

Mandy Milkovich was the kind of girl that refused to apologize. She had learned from her brothers to be loud, opinionated, and ruthless; Mickey knew this was a fact, because he had made sure of it.

For a Milkovich, the most important thing was not to be right, but to have conviction. If you were gonna skip class, you had to walk out the front doors with your middle fingers up. If someone needed a beat down, you had to send your fist flying and believe that it deserved to land. If you wanted something, you had to picture yourself having it, and then you had to take it.

Mickey had taken a lot of things in his short life. So had Mandy.

Before she had dropped out of school and disappeared, Mandy had been a black-haired, blue-eyed slip of girl-shaped _intent_ , running her finger like a hook inside the collar of any boy she wanted, smashing her stolen police baton into chain link fences when there were other people on the sidewalk, flooring getaway cars or revenge cars or just-for-fun cars without hesitation.

From her first newborn gasp of breath, Mandy had been a girl born into a den of wolves, and she had neither been consumed by them nor become a wolf herself; she was just a teenager who streaked her hair pink and aced her English classes and took no fucking prisoners.

Mickey loved her fiercely.

When he looked at Mandy, Mickey saw himself, but freer. They had the same straight, sharp nose, the same dark hair, the same deadly eyebrows sharpened over blue Milkovich eyes. Mickey’s face curved where Mandy’s was angular, but still, it was impossible to deny that they were siblings—the two youngest, united in being just a little bit smarter, a little bit more open minded than the rest of their family. They smoked together and played video games together and fought together, a united team against whoever was around, a spitting pair of cobras squaring off against one another when they ran out of other opponents. But Mandy was daring where Mickey was cautious: she took what she wanted, just like Mickey had taught her, but she did it where everyone could see.

This was what Mickey envied about his sister. She threw herself into every situation, never imagining that she would be disappointed. She was always ready to go again even when shit went wrong.

Mickey, on the other hand, tried hard not to want things. He had to remember who he was. What his father was. When Mickey charged headfirst, he did it knowing that it was going to hurt.

There had never been a specific moment where Mickey came out to his sister, not exactly. It had gone a little bit more like this: Mickey, on his knees under the high school bleachers with some dude’s spunk dripping down his chin; Mandy, tugging a guy by the hand to presumably put herself in the same situation that Mickey was in. They locked eyes.

The reedy kid attached to the dick in Mickey’s mouth didn’t seem to notice the interruption, and Mandy, masterful manipulator that she was, spun her catch around before he could see the roadblock. “Come on,” she had commanded, though her tone was all suggestion, “Let’s go back to my place instead. I changed my mind about what I want.”

Much later, after Mickey had snuck into the house, Mandy had taken it upon herself to barge into Mickey’s room. Her eyes were narrow and sly the way they got when she knew she had won something. “Safety first, big brother,” she had called, gleeful, before tossing a sleeve of condoms at him. They smacked him across the face, and Mickey had heard her cackle all the way back to her room.

As far as Mickey knew, Mandy had never told anyone his secret. He wasn’t completely sure; he had never gotten to ask her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For everyone who has read this story so far, thank you so much! Every time there's a new comment or view or what-have-you, I smile like a crazy person.  
> Also, this is the part of the story where we say "Science???????" and just kinda shrug our shoulders, so. There's that.


	5. Chapter 5

Food was a little bit complicated, but Mickey felt like Ian deserved it. Mickey even told him so; Ian’s first meal as a person had been a chipped mug full of mac and cheese, and he had pronounced it delicious through the last chipmunk-round mouthful, right before hurtling to the trash can to vomit up everything he had eaten. It turned out that brand new bodies weren’t equipped to jump right into the world of processed orange cheeses, especially if they had been shoveled down at warp speed, and Mickey thought it served Ian right. “Payback for makin’ me sick every five fuckin’ seconds,” Mickey had commented indifferently over Ian’s varied retching noises.

There was a mean corner of Mickey’s heart that hoped Ian would get at least a few solid days of nausea. He deserved it. There was another corner that wanted to go get some mint tea or Pepto Bismol or some shit so that Ian wouldn’t have to be hungry or sick or unhappy. Disgusted with his lack of spine, Mickey compromised by putting some minute rice on to boil instead. He figured it might be flavorless and inoffensive enough that Ian could keep it down.

“Jesus,” Ian gasped, resurfacing from his detailed inspection of the black bag lining the trash can, “Is that what that feels like every time? I’m so sorry.”

_Sorry._ “They taught you about Jesus, huh? Comprehensive fuckin’ course.” Mickey eyed Ian. He looked clammy and flushed. There was a question Mickey wanted to ask, but he wasn’t sure if he really wanted the answer; he brought his thumb up to worry his bottom lip, thought _fuck it_ , and then went for it. “Did you know, at all? What you were doing to me all those times?”

Ian dragged his fingers through his hair, then again, though the gesture did nothing to settle its wiry disarray. He spit into the trash can one more time. “Sometimes. Not at first. I didn’t—it was hard to control how much I was doing, you know? I could tell when you felt bad, and when it was—better. I tried not to make it feel bad, if I could help it.” His voice was quiet. He wouldn’t meet Mickey’s eyes.

Something black in the pit of Mickey’s stomach rolled over. “Right,” Mickey said. His voice was quiet, too, but in a way that sounded like a threat. “You, uh. You didn’t want me to feel bad.” He quirked a sardonic smile, tilted his head. Took the rice off the burner. One of his eyebrows was a deadly weapon: it inched upward, an island rising out of smooth water, the only indication that a hissing bay of lava boiled underneath. “And you just thought, hey, he looks useful, I’m definitely gonna fuck with his head, but while I’m here I might as well—”

“No,” Ian interrupted. He looked at Mickey now. His chin was so fiercely set that Mickey almost laughed. “I get that I messed with your life, and I’m sorry for the parts that sucked, but I needed you, and—I thought maybe you needed me, too.”

Mickey snorted.

“Don’t do that, you know exactly what I’m talking about.” Ian’s voice was all fire. “There were five other people in your city alone that I could have communicated with, not to mention a bunch of others way closer to here, but I didn’t _like_ any of them. They weren’t funny. They didn’t get shit done like you do. They didn’t—I liked that thing, where it almost felt like I could touch you. I liked that you liked it.” Ian’s eyebrows drew in, less dangerous than Mickey’s, two shorelines having a conversation rather than a scorching landmass being born. “I liked making you feel good, when it worked.”

Mickey took this in. His tongue prodded absently at his lip. Did Ian’s sincerity change anything? He wasn’t sure. Mickey filled a mug with tap water, and another with rice; he really needed to ask Kev for some extra bowls. Mickey, unused to sharing, usually just ate out of the pan. “Sit down,” Mickey ordered. “Sometime this year, you look like you’re about to fuckin’ fall over.”

This was true: Ian was still tacky with sweat and pale from getting sick. He went to the couch and sat. Mickey handed him the two mugs. “If you can’t eat this, I don’t know what to fuckin’ tell you.”

The water went down first, to clear the abysmal taste from his mouth, and then Ian moved on to the rice with much more hesitation than he had shown when setting upon the mac and cheese. He pulled a face at the first spoonful. “That other stuff was way better,” he said. The words were all mushed up by his full mouth. There was a grain of rice stuck to his bottom lip. “This tastes like water, but…bad.”

“Sucks, man. It ain’t my problem that you’re fuckin’ delicate.”

The rice was a more successful venture than the macaroni, if not a more delicious one. Ian managed it in a few more bites, then set the mug on the ratty carpet and leaned over until he was lying in a slumped heap across the couch. “My mouth tastes like ass,” he offered forlornly.

“Pretty sure ass tastes way better,” Mickey replied under his breath. Ian’s mouth tipped up into a smile. “Alright, Zenon, moment of truth: now’s the time to tell me if you’ve got any big plans in mind for being a person, ‘cause if so, I may not be your ideal tour guide.”

Ian closed his eyes. They were very large, Ian’s eyes; sharp at the corners, freckled on the lids, murky in color. Mickey found that they were easier to look at when closed. “It would be cool to go places, maybe,” he said after a moment of thought. “Do some stuff.”

“Great.”

“Well. I guess I don’t really know what the options are.”

“I can tell that you really thought this whole thing through,” Mickey said sarcastically. “Good to know that I won’t fall short of your expectations.” He flipped Ian the TV remote. “Red button makes it turn on. Button on the left makes it loud, button on the right makes the fundamentalist nutcases go away, or summons some chick named Giada, take your fuckin’ pick. I’ll be back.”

The parentheses around Ian’s mouth deepened unhappily. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

“You’ll figure it out. I’m gonna go buy your sorry ass a toothbrush, you can thank me later.” Mickey’s keys scratched across the counter when he grabbed them, clanking together in little metallic bursts. He pointed at Ian with his free hand. “You better be here when I get back, got it? Don’t wander off looking for peyote, or ditches, or whatever other bullshit you’re into. I’m not haulin’ you out of the desert twice.”

“Bet you would,” Ian mumbled.

“Go fuck yourself,” Mickey replied, then slammed the door.

When Mickey came back, it was with a new toothbrush, a pair of slippers that he had guessed might fit Ian, and a box of instant potatoes. He had also stopped by the town’s thrift store and found some okay clothes, an extra blanket, and a couple of bowls, since he seemed to be severely lacking in them.

Ian was asleep when Mickey entered the house, despite the insistent rustling of plastic bags that announced his arrival. Ian had managed to work the TV after all, because Alton Brown was droning on about making gravy or something. Mickey remembered a time when he didn’t know who Alton Brown was. He missed that.

Mickey set his bags on the counter, and left them there. The pointy pile of boy in his living room was much more interesting than the pile of groceries, honestly, and Mickey was disappointed in himself because of it. The problem was that he wanted to like Ian. Or, that he _did_ like Ian, but was angry with him. Or, that he was having trouble processing Ian’s origins and general existence. It was possible that nothing happening was even real.

On his way around the counter, Mickey stubbed his toe. That was definitely real. The racket of curse words he unleashed startled Ian awake, and he looked around in a moment of panic before his eyes settled on Mickey.

“Oh,” he said, then yawned. “I missed you.” His face creased up in a tired frown, and his sleep-squinted eyes flicked toward the TV. “What’s a casserole?”

Mickey was a fucking idiot. He grinned. It was the easiest thing in the world.

*

For someone who was not exactly a person, Mickey thought that Ian looked pretty damn good. He let himself think it now, released from guilt or shame or the possibility of Ian actually being inside his head listening. Mickey didn’t know how the whole body thing worked, but there was no doubt that it had _worked_.

It wasn’t like Mickey’s specific type was ginger, or long legged, or extraterrestrial, or any other thing. Mickey’s type _before_ had been whoever was discreet and willing at the same time that he was, which had meant that there weren’t many options. Beggars couldn’t be choosers and all that—not that Mickey had ever begged anyone for anything in his life—but there was something to be said for a nice view without having to beg _or_ choose.

Ian’s shoulders were broad, his arm muscles rounded and noticeable, his forearms slim and corded. His hands were wide with long, elegant fingers. Mickey had a hard time looking away from the fingers. The fingertips were just blunt enough, the knuckles just prominent enough. It was easy to picture what those fingers might do once they were all slicked up.

There was the narrow waist, the collarbone, the wide thighs, the neck. Ian’s neck was long, long, and there were a hundred places on it alone that Mickey wanted to put his mouth. _Sternocleidomastoid_. For a word learned in such an unlikely way, it was quickly becoming one of Mickey’s favorites.

Mickey knew that Ian had used him, was still using him, maybe, but he could hardly bring himself to care anymore. It had been days since Mickey had found himself listless or without purpose. He had never liked being alone, and had always preferred to have some sort of goal or activity to drive him; with his family gone, he had settled into everything that he didn’t want. Most of the last year had been a perfect combination of lethargy and loneliness, during which he had begun to feel less like a person and more like a shapeless ache that happened to be inside a body.

With Ian around, though, Mickey was starting to remember himself. Ian was funny and sexy and weird, an inexplicable presence with good instincts and bizarre gaps in his knowledge. It was fun to watch him try to work a can opener, or to release him on an unsuspecting grocery store, or to watch his mouth part in awed wonder whenever the neighbor’s dog jangled past.

Mickey liked to talk, but he also liked to be entertained, and Ian provided opportunity for both. And maybe it was just because Ian didn’t know any better, but he also made Mickey feel _understood_ , or at least at liberty to speak without filtering himself. Why would Ian care if Mickey was gay, or crude, or uneducated, or any other thing? Ian himself was a fuckin’ space alien, and Mickey figured that taking Ian’s existence in stride was way beyond what most people would do. The least Ian could do in return was accept Mickey’s eccentricities.

Ian did. And, there was this, too: Ian, in Mickey’s bed with the new blanket; Mickey, on the couch with the old one. It never lasted long. After an hour or so, Ian would come in with the blanket around his shoulders like a cape (see, good instincts) and sit on Mickey’s feet until Mickey wriggled them out and propped them on Ian’s lap. There was a different excuse every night: he wasn’t tired, or it was too dark, or too hot, or he slept better on the couch.

After that one, Mickey gave Ian the couch and reclaimed his bed for the first time in a week. He was half-asleep, burrowed face first into his pillow, when Ian came in.

“It’s too quiet out there,” Ian whispered.

Mickey groaned in response. “Turn on the fuckin’ TV. Sing a song. I don’t give a shit.”

Ian sat down, his hip a snug puzzle piece against Mickey’s side. “The couch has lumps in it.”

“Tell me about it.” Mickey turned his head, and opened one eye to appraise the situation. Ian was draped in a cascade of blanket, and looked uncertain. Like Mickey would ever make him leave.

“I’m too tall to lay flat on that thing,” Ian continued, as if this was an argument. He swung his feet onto the bed, and stuck them under Mickey’s blanket.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ.” Mickey flopped up onto his side, with his back to Ian, and shifted over. “Whatever. Do whatever you want. Just go the fuck to sleep.”

Mickey could feel Ian tossing around, trying to get his blanket facing the right direction, trying to find a corner of pillow to steal. When Ian finally settled, his breath was a warm breeze on the back of Mickey’s neck.

The bed was immeasurably smaller with two people in it.

“I don’t like being by myself,” Ian said, finally, voice quiet with honesty, and touched his hand blindly to Mickey’s back.

A memory nudged at Mickey, a memory of his dream in the Wal-Mart parking lot: smoothing hands, bumping noses, a disembodied voice. Somehow, he thought, he had found everything he was looking for, whether it was real or not.

He didn’t answer Ian. Instead, he pushed himself backwards, just a little bit, and let Ian nose into his hair. Let him sigh. It was simple. Ian slid his hand under Mickey’s shirt and thumbed at his waist. “I want to kiss you,” Ian breathed, and pushed his fingertips into the edge of Mickey’s stomach, right where it was soft.

Mickey froze. _No,_ he thought, _you don’t._ Life-long instinct, icy and thrumming, shot through Mickey’s body.“Kiss me and I’ll cut your fuckin’ tongue out,” he said, finally. He moved his head forward, away from the danger of Ian’s face.

Ian, who had also gone very still, let all of his breath out at once like he had been holding it—and then he huffed a laugh into Mickey’s hair. “Okay,” Ian said. He didn’t make any move toward Mickey’s mouth, which meant that he must have had some amount of self-preservation. Except—after a second, there was a damp, searing _o_ pressed against the top of Mickey’s shoulder blade, then another in the dip where his spine sat, and then a third on the back of his neck.

Fuck, was it good. Mickey wanted badly to twist his head to the side, to smear his mouth into Ian’s and take what was being offered, but he couldn’t. There was a difference between Ian wanting to kiss _someone_ and Ian wanting to kiss _Mickey_ ; the fact was that Ian didn’t know any better, and Mickey was tired of being convenient.

Mickey threw himself out of bed, blanket clutched in one hand, and exiled himself to the living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For everyone who has been responding, thank you so much--I'm sorry I haven't gotten a chance to reply to your comments, the last couple of weeks have been crazy. Here's a chapter to make up for it!  
> ♥️


	6. Chapter 6

Since Mickey now lived in a middle-of-nowhere town seemingly lost to the ages, there was an actual video rental store still operating, wedged between the laundromat and the town’s only liquor store. Both the rental place and the liquor store were usually empty when Mickey went in; the exception was on Halloween, when Mickey stopped by to pick up a case of beer while Ian was next door looking at movies. Kev had explained to Mickey once that most of the Alibi’s business came from the rez, from people stopping at the first legal source of alcohol they saw. The town’s cultural approach to drinking was not quite what Mickey was used to. Between the reservations, where the sale of alcohol was illegal, and all of the fucking Mormons, people just didn’t drink in the desert the way they did in Chicago.

Whatever. Mickey figured that it meant more for him. He unloaded the beer into the back of the Jeep, then went into the video store to find Ian. It wasn’t hard to spot him; the shop was small, and his lurid head of red hair would have betrayed him anyway.

Ian heard the door open, and looked up. His hands were full of DVD cases, and his face was a barely contained mask of glee. “Hey, Mick, come look at this!”

Mickey sauntered over, and Ian fanned out his movie selections for Mickey to admire. It took Mickey a moment to figure out what Ian’s theme was, but once he understood, he just groaned. It explained why Ian looked so pleased with himself, at least. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, man.”

“Oh, whatever! You can’t tell me that this isn’t funny! I’m fucking _hilarious_ , Mickey. Look at this! Spooky! Isn’t Halloween supposed to be spooky?” Ian wiggled the DVDs around in a poor attempt at a sales pitch.

A couple of his choices actually were horror movies, but more than that, they were all _alien_ movies. On the more watchable end of the spectrum were _Signs_ and _Alien vs. Predator_ ; on the iffier side of things were _Killer Klowns from Outer Space_ , and _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_.

“No fuckin’ way,” Mickey said, tapping the cover of the last movie with his index finger. “That looks gay as hell and I’m not watchin’ it.”

Ian frowned. “I want to see that one.”

Mickey grabbed _Alien vs. Predator_. “Look, it’s Halloween, and Halloween rules say that someone’s gotta get their face ripped off in the movie. That’s just the way it’s gotta be. I can work with the whole alienthing, but goddamn, at least find something good.”

Ian’s chin jutted out stubbornly. Mickey wondered what the equivalent of that move had been in Ian’s old body. “We can each pick one. You want face ripping, and I want whatever this is.” He shook the movie at Mickey again, fingers conveniently covering most of Tim Curry’s lingerie. “The lady up front said this was the best alien movie they had.”

The lady in question had her eyes fixed on the front desk’s computer screen, no doubt pretending to work, but she was clearly biting back laughter. Mickey sent her the deadliest glare he could muster.

“You fucking suck, Ian,” Mickey spat. Ian smiled his improbable smile, realizing that he had won. Mickey rolled his eyes. “Alright, alright, fine, but we’re watching mine first. _And_ ,” he continued, pointing a stern finger at Ian for emphasis, “We’re stopping again on the way home, and I’m getting the biggest fuckin’ bag of candy I can find, so fuck you.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you too,” Ian replied good naturedly, as he got started on returning the rest of the movies to their homes.

Mickey went up to the desk to pay; the lady opened her mouth to launch into her “did-you-find-everything-okay” spiel, but Mickey cut her off before she could start. “Don’t say a fuckin’ word,” he growled, and she raised her hands in surrender.

After picking up a truly massive bag of fun-size candy bars—Mickey chose the one that looked like it had the most Snickers in it—they drove home. Ian fiddled idly with the buttons on the radio, and Mickey let him. It was entertaining, in the way that most things Ian did were entertaining, but the static crackle of country music to Christian ministry to fuzzy alt rock also mediated their silence. It felt funny just because it was happening, felt like a joke: a ghetto kid and an alien walk into a car. It felt like some kind of weird symbiosis, to drive with Ian next to him, and for it to be Halloween, and for them to go in the same direction at all.

That night’s sunset was a cold, greyish descent from bright sky to dark sky, as if someone had slowly lowered a dimmer switch. Mickey hadn’t realized that the desert could look anything but dead, but, faced with the dregs of October, he had to admit that September had been positively vibrant in comparison. The colorful splashes of Indian Paintbrush were gone; the little, wizened trees were brittle and wind-bent; the sagebrush no longer fanned at his ankles as he walked, but snapped dully under his feet. The remains of summer—splintered sticks and yellow foxtail stickers—were in Mickey’s socks, in the carpet.

The trailer was cool and dim when they went in. Mickey went first, with the beer; Ian followed with the movies and the candy, tripping on the dented metal threshold, laughing his laugh that started out slow _ha ha ha_ before it tapered off into something like a giggle. Mickey cracked open a beer for himself, then one for Ian, who choked at the taste at first, and then downed the rest like a dose of medicine, fast, dripping down his chin. He finished with a cough, then a soft, pleased quirk of his lips. Mickey didn’t even bother to drag his eyes away from the tiny streams of liquid pebbling along Ian’s throat.

They watched the first movie tumbled together on the couch, kicking at each other, taking bets on how long Ian would be able to keep down the train of Kit Kats he had inhaled. They started with _Alien vs Predator_ as promised, and Mickey crowed when the creatures on screen finally started getting shit done, attaching to faces and ripping out of people’s chests; Ian rolled his eyes, threw a candy bar at Mickey’s forehead, started off with “Come _on_ , that’s not even _accurate_!” and followed with “Bet that’s what you want me to do to you, huh?” The movie ended with Ian trying to avoid Mickey’s flailing legs while he stuck his fingers in Mickey’s armpits and sides, with Mickey throwing elbows and screeching death threats and laughing and asking how Ian even knew about tickling people in the fucking first place.

The second movie involved Mickey saying “What the _fuck_ ” every few minutes like clockwork, with a different intonation each time to really drive his feelings home. It also involved Ian with his mouth parted, big eyes fixed on the screen, left thumb absently wearing a pattern onto Mickey’s ankle. Mickey allowed it. It had been a while since the time that Ian had tried to kiss him; he wondered if he would allow Ian to kiss him now, if Ian offered again. He thought that he might. His resolve was weaker than it had been before.

Ian was wholeheartedly on board with _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_ as soon as Dr. Frank-N-Furter came out in his corset. Mickey, on the other hand, had no fucking clue what was happening, but he found that he could actually enjoy himself if he focused on Ian’s commentary rather than on the screen. The rest of the movie was a stream of “What is he _wearing_?” “I don’t fucking know, Ian, some lace-up girly shit, Jesus,” “Oh— _fuck_ , what is _he_ wearing?” “Dude, those are one-hundred-percent gay-ass gold booty shorts.” “ _I want them_.”

And then, it was not so much the two of them watching the movie as it was Mickey pretending that two dudes weren’t sort of fucking on screen, pretending that he wasn’t hard, that Ian wasn’t halfway there, too, even though he _was_ , because Mickey kept darting his eyes sideways to look. It was Ian, sliding his hand under Mickey’s baggy jeans and up his leg, nudging his fingertips through the hair on Mickey’s calf, pressing them into the dip where muscle gave way to bone. It was some fucking song playing from the TV, something about dreams. There might’ve been a swimming pool on the screen. It was hard to tell.

Ian’s fingers hooked behind Mickey’s knee and stretched out there. Mickey let out a breath; it was meant to be slow, inconspicuous, but it came out in a huff.

The sound was like a signal. Ian’s hand moved out from under Mickey’s clothes, and then he was shifting across the couch, low and sinuous like a hunting animal, until he was laying half behind, half on top of Mickey. One hand sunk into the couch under Mickey’s back. The other worked its way into the coarse fabric of Mickey’s sweater.

Mickey could feel his heart pounding, tapping through the skin of his neck, his lips, his wrists. He felt kind of stupid, looking up at Ian like he was: his chin was folded against his neck, and what stubble he could grow scratched there; his mouth was coming open by itself; his eyes were half-lidded, transfixed. There was no part of Ian he didn’t want to touch.

“I know I can’t kiss you.” Ian’s breath was humid and close against Mickey’s cheek. “But is there anything I _can_ do?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Mickey breathed. Ian’s eyes were huge, dark, the pupil indistinguishable from the iris. Everywhere Ian pressed against him felt electric.

Mickey was suddenly, microscopically aware of everything, of the minute rasp of denim against denim, of how solid Ian’s knees felt where they bracketed Mickey’s thigh, of the way Ian’s jaw was tightened and challenging, but his mouth was relaxed. Mickey’s ears were ringing. Every time Ian’s breath hit him, a shuddering _zing_ raced down his sides.

Ian smoothed a hand up Mickey’s chest. “C’mon, Mick,” he murmured into Mickey’s neck, shifting his hips just a little bit—just enough. His nose grazed the round swoop of Mickey’s jawbone.

All of this was familiar. Ian knew Mickey from the inside out, and Mickey’s body remembered it. Hands. Noses. The invisible nudge of deep heat thrilling up Mickey’s spine. Hadn’t he been waiting for this? Wasn’t this his to have?

Mickey pushed his tongue against his bottom lip and looked over Ian one last time, as if he was still deciding, but the decision was already made. Ian lifted his head, and their eyes met, and all at once Mickey was yanking his sweater over his head and undoing the button on his jeans, while Ian triumphantly copied.

“You know how this works, or did they skip that lesson in alien exchange school?” Mickey asked glibly, while trying to shove down his boxers. He was finding the task rather difficult; Ian was still trying to peel off his own jeans, and there was nowhere near enough room on the couch for both things to happen at once.

Ian panted out a laugh. “I’ve got a general idea,” he replied, then, “Hah!” when he managed to kick the remainder of his clothes onto the floor. His hair was already a wreck. “You might have to show me some of the finer points, though,” Ian continued. Together, they managed to get Mickey’s boxers off.

It had felt like slow work while it was happening, but once they were both naked, time seemed to lurch forward. There was heat everywhere, and Ian hard against his thigh when Mickey drew his knees apart; and then Mickey had Ian’s cock in his hand, and fuck, really? that was a lot of cock; and he was twisting his hand and stroking, knuckles brushing against Ian’s stomach, and Ian was making these _sounds._ And then Ian’s hand was on Mickey, too, fumbling, dragging accidentally through a spot that was sticky and wet before finding what he was looking for, fitting Mickey into his palm, not quite right, and asking “Is this—do you—?”

Mickey lent his other hand to help Ian, tangling their fingers together, adjusting Ian’s grip. He could smell the soap they both used, the sour ghost of chocolate when Ian’s breath met his own, the heady tang of Ian leaking through the fingers of Mickey’s right hand. _F U C K_ , his knuckles said. Mickey had to agree with them.

The light from the TV flickered over them, edging Ian’s face blue, then sickly yellow. It caught on the snubbed swoop of Ian’s nose, glazed a harsh, piercing gleam onto Ian’s eyes, and suddenly Mickey remembered like a punch to the gut that Ian _was not human_ —for a moment, fear thrilled through him, and then Ian started moving his hand. His chin was set, pushed out in determination, mouth parted slightly while he tried to concentrate on what he was doing as well as what was being done to him, and the groan easing out of Mickey’s mouth turned into a wild laugh without his permission.

Ian scowled, at least as much as he could while his eyes fluttered shut. It mostly involved his eyebrows doing something funny, and Mickey laughed again.

“Why are you laughing?” Ian asked indignantly.

Mickey ran his thumb up and over the head of Ian’s cock, savoring the little sigh it brought. _I’m laughing because your face is doing that thing it does_? No, that wouldn’t work. Mickey settled for a different truth. “Because this is a real stupid fuckin’ idea, is why.”

Ian stilled his hand. “What is?”

Mickey rolled his eyes, shifted a little so that his bent leg was pushed more snugly against Ian’s. “You. Me. Us. This whole thing.” He let go of Ian to gesture between them vaguely.

Ian made a protesting sort of sound. “Seems like a good idea to me.” He started stroking Mickey again, as if in demonstration of how great an idea it really was.

“Feels like a good idea,” Mickey agreed, letting his eyes fall to where Ian’s hand worked, “but it’s not. I’m the only fuckin’ person you know, Ian. What happens when this backfires and you don’t have a back-up plan? Or when— _fuck_ —you meet someone else, and I get in the way? Or how about—”

“Mickey.”

“—when you decide to go back to fuckin’—Transylvania, or whatever—”

“Mickey, come on—”

“—or when someone comes lookin’ for you here—”

“ _Mickey_.”

“—or when I do some weird shit you don’t like—”

“Jesus, Mickey, s _hut the fuck up_.”

Ian pushed forward, slotted their hips together, and _dragged_ —and fuck, okay, Mickey didn’t need telling twice. Ian did it again, then again, until Mickey was panting, fluttering his fingers against the smooth, bunching muscles of Ian’s back, pressing into the dimples at the base of his spine, saying, “Fuck, okay, okay, hang on I gotta—you gotta let me up, I need to get—I’ll be right back, just— _Ian_ come on, it’ll be worth it—”

And then he was stumbling into his room, tearing through his duffel bag _where the fuck is it, come on, where the fuck_ until his fingers finally tripped across his half-empty bottle of lube, he was going to have to get more if shit like this kept happening, goddamn, and then he padded back into the living room to find Ian sprawled across the couch, long legs bent and fallen open, jerking himself off all slow, and it was all Mickey could do not to lose his fucking mind right there. _You’re already crazy_ , Mickey reminded himself, before swatting Ian’s hand away and crawling in between his legs.

He mouthed his way up Ian’s cock, just for a second, just because he wanted to, let himself enjoy the salt and the slick and the tickle of coarse hair curling against his chin, before he sat up and untwisted the cap on the bottle of lube. It took a couple shakes before he could squeeze any out, but after a moment his fingers were coated.

“What’s that for?” Ian asked. His voice was rough, and his eyes were heavy lidded, trained on Mickey.

“It’s so you don’t fuckin’ wreck me, is what,” Mickey said, raising his eyebrows and glancing pointedly at where Ian’s cock was hard against his stomach. “Not that it wouldn’t be worth it,” he amended, then shuffled his legs apart until he could reach behind himself, pushing one of Ian’s legs off the couch in the process.

“Hey,” Ian protested, and then, “Oh—fuck, that’s hot.”

Mickey sank a finger into himself, then a second, pulled them out for more lube, tried the second finger again. Ian reached back to help, but, finding that there wasn’t much for him to do, settled for brushing hesitantly against the stretch of skin around Mickey’s fingers. Mickey groaned.

“Get that—yeah, the bottle, get your fingers wet,” Mickey instructed. Ian withdrew his hand, did as Mickey asked, then returned his knuckles to stroke around Mickey’s fingers where they were disappearing. Mickey shuddered. “Fuck yes, okay, now see—see if you can get one of your fingers in with mine.”

It turned out that Ian could. Mickey scissored his fingers apart, as much as he could, at least, and Ian worked his middle finger into the gap. Ian’s finger was longer and thicker than Mickey’s and after a few minutes, the combined sensations of Ian’s movements and his own had Mickey shivering.

“Another one?” Ian murmured, eventually, once Mickey was easily taking the first three fingers.

Mickey glanced again between Ian’s legs, and let out an amused little huff. “Yeah, maybe,” he conceded, but Ian had barely nudged a fourth finger in when Mickey shook his head. “No, fuck, never mind, if we don’t do this right fuckin’ now I’m not gonna last long enough to get you in me.”

There were fingers, and then there weren’t. Instead, there was Mickey, dragging Ian’s legs closer together so he could fit his own knees in on either side, saying “I think it’ll work better like this, at least the first time,” saying “no, stay where you fuckin’ are, gimme one second,” saying “fuck, that’s good, holy shit Ian.”

There was Mickey, riding Ian into the couch, palming himself with occasional distracted help, watching Ian’s mouth open and open and open; there was Ian’s hand, dry and hot, a wandering shape of heat against the smooth skin of Mickey’s back, against the gripping sweat of his hip. There was Ian’s giddy grin, the stilling of his hips when Mickey shifted from kneeling to balancing on his feet; the restart of his attempts at rhythm while Mickey worked backwards into him and forwards into his own hand; his retreat back into stillness when Mickey made a sound that sent Ian shuddering.

There was Mickey, working himself, brimming with sparking warmth, leaning into Ian, smiling in wicked relief right before they finally panted to a stop.

Ian was the first to start laughing, but the sound dragged Mickey in too, until they were both alight with it, letting elbows and knees fly wherever, each trying playfully to shove the other off the couch.

The DVD screen played on repeat, red lips pursing and swimming on a black background. The world outside was quiet.

*

In the morning, through a mouthful of dry toast, Ian said, “We should go somewhere.”

Mickey just shrugged in response. “Yeah, okay.”

*

Mickey didn’t think he would ever get over actually being in the car with Ian, not after his days and days of driving with the wild, unformed _idea_ of Ian taking up so much space. He had to admit that real Ian was much more fun: the idea of Ian had haunted him, but real Ian chattered, and flicked idly through every static-y station the radio had to offer, and slid a mischievous hand up and down Mickey’s thigh until they had to pull over and do something about it.

The Grand Canyon was only three hours or so from where they lived, so that was where they were going.

The shitty gas station CDs never even made it into the rotation, with Ian in charge of background noise. There were questions, about their destination and the weather and how long they were going to stay, none of which Mickey knew the answer to. There was Ian opening the glove box, closing it, opening it again to shuffle through the contents, closing it again. Ian rolling down the window and sputtering “oh, fuck,” into the roar of cold air that slammed in and caught him in the eyes. There were moments of silence, moments that Ian did surprisingly well, where they stilled into the kind of undemanding quiet possible between two people who were used to falling asleep in the same room.

Mickey’s hands sometimes stuck to the steering wheel when he went too long without moving them, so he moved them often, and the little clicks of his skin separating from the black plastic fed into the engine’s hum. When Mickey’s right hand moved, it stirred the air, and the air it stirred smelled like sex, because earlier when they had pulled over, Ian had fucked up into Mickey’s hand and come all over Mickey’s fingers, and on his wrist. He moved his hand again—not out of necessity this time, but just to hold on to the memory—and breathed. Let the scent coat his mouth.

“So, have you ever been here before?” Ian asked, slow like he did sometimes, the words fuzzy at the edges, like he was taking just a second too long to make sure the words came out how he wanted them to. Mickey appreciated that about him.

“Where, the middle of the fuckin’ desert? Yeah, I been there, and so’ve you,” Mickey replied, a smart-assed grin eating up his face. He liked playing that game, where he made easy answers into fun ones.

Ian threw his head to the side, rolled his eyes, let an exasperated little smile pinch at the corners of his lips. Ian liked playing the game, too. “Come on, Mick, you know what I mean. The _Grand Canyon_.”

Mickey raised his eyebrows, let his smile settle. “Nope. Never came out this far until now. I’m pretty sure it’s just a couple of fuckin’—rocks, or somethin’, then a lot of space where there used to be rocks but now there’s jack shit. Empty, like. It might suck, I dunno, but it’s on the ‘Great American Landmarks’ list, so whatever.” Mickey shrugged. His shoulders felt relaxed—not just relaxed, but like there had never been a time when they had ached. “Fuckload of tourists can’t all be wrong, though, huh?”

There was a thirty dollar fee to get in when they reached the National Park entrance; Mickey grumbled enough to make a point, but paid, mostly because Ian counted out the right amount and denomination of bills from Mickey’s wallet, and looked pleased with himself about it.

They drove along the bleak little road until they reached a viewpoint accessible by private vehicle. They had a map, but it was more or less useless, since Ian—despite his enthusiasm—couldn’t actually read a map, and Mickey was driving and also didn’t really give a shit. So they followed signs, and went where the road went, and stopped as soon as they saw other cars stopped.

The viewpoint was almost completely empty, which seemed like the kind of luck that set Mickey’s teeth on edge, but he understood why no one was around as soon as he parked and opened the door: outside, it was winter. The wind that hit his face was a cool breath, and then a cold breath; immediately, Mickey was reminded of Chicago. He hadn’t realized that they even got real winter in the desert.

The dry, fuzzy scent of the brittle vegetation clinging to the dirt brushed past along with the November air, and when he flexed his fingers, Mickey half expected to feel the acrylic squeak of his cheap winter gloves. The phantom weight of his coat against his chin was there too, just for a second, and then gone, a memory from his last winter of sludging through dirt-grey snow piled higher than the edges of the sidewalks. He hadn’t thought to bring his coat, now.

Ian stepped up beside him, wordless, arms crossed over his chest. Mickey could feel Ian’s proximity the same way someone might look at a picture: the round ends of broad shoulders, a straight back, hair that looked more red, or maybe less, next to the endless orange dirt, all in a silhouette against the landscape. Himself right there, too, just a tick of the eyes over from Ian, shorter and dark-haired and windswept and inelegant, turning his body, turning his head to look up at the stark spray of freckles amongst the barely there hair wiry on Ian’s jaw. Turning to align himself with Ian, an unconscious gesture meant to tell anybody who looked at them that they had arrived together, and would be leaving that way.

“Wanna go look?” Ian murmured, tilting his head toward Mickey, but keeping his eyes glued forward. His fingers tapped restlessly against his bicep. He wanted to move like a dog watching a squirrel wanted the screen door open.

“Yeah.” They shot off like a spring uncoiled, and walked so that every step made their arms bump. Every time it happened, something dangerous shivered in Mickey’s throat.

They fought through some scrubby trees, curved gently along a skinny dirt path, and stopped, finally, to look at the earth ending.

Mickey had expected the view to be harsh, a bottomless split like the ground had been cracked open, a skull of banded rock that some giant had taken his axe to. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was dramatic, but not sudden: the land opened up the way the sky might, big with color and piled to the root with bright, undulating rock, stacked up like so many clouds. It was startling to think that what they were seeing had been carved by time and water, that North America had not been born like this, but had instead chosen to give some of itself up. To make room.

Here were nearly two thousand miles that had once been solid rock, now yawning, but not empty. All of that space was full of light.

“Wow,” Ian whispered. “How weird.”

“Yeah.” There was a raw spot aching behind Mickey’s sternum. “Tell me about it.”

*

There had never been a single goddamned star in the sky over Chicago, not compared to the desert at night. It was like someone had loaded up a god-sized paintbrush with fire, and splattered it across the endless black overhead. Every bright speck seemed much too close. They all hurt to look at, each one a little more than the last.

Mickey had humored Ian all day, driving around to find different points to look out from, examining the terrain, even going so far as to—well, Mickey wasn’t going to call it _hiking_ , because he didn’t _do_ shit like that, but there had definitely been some strenuous uphill walking that was entirely Ian’s fault.

Ian had been thrilled. Mickey wasn’t going to complain.

Sunset had come along early to turn everything orange and purple, and they had stayed to watch. Ian had fished Mickey’s phone out of the pocket of Mickey’s jeans with a ruddy, curious hand, had fumbled the phone into camera mode and used it to take a million identical photographs. Mickey had smiled at each one, agreeing that photo two was better than photo one was better than photo A was clearer than photo B.

And now, there was the dark, and the stars.

They had both agreed that it was time to go. Except, instead of leaving, Mickey unlocked the back door of the Jeep and raised it, so he and Ian could crawl into the back and sit with their feet dangling over the edge of the car, over the orange dirt turned grey in the moonlight.

It was cold. Mickey remembered sleeping in the same spot he was sitting in, dreaming of warmth and of light and of Ian, invisible and pressed against his front. Ian, who was here now, tired and quiet. Ian, who was staring at the wide sky. Ian, who had come from somewhere within it.

Mickey accidentally-on-purpose brushed the backs of their hands together. Ian turned his eyes to meet Mickey’s, and then turned them away again. His mouth, no longer pink under the shadow of night, worked its way open until it could speak.

“I never thought I knew anything about the stars,” Ian said. His eyelashes caught some of the moon’s glowy sheen and held it, a wash of light concentrated into fluttering streaks. “But being here, and looking at everything—the stars look wrong. Or, not wrong, I guess, but different, you know? Like, the pattern’s different, even though I didn’t know I was seeing a pattern to begin with.” His fingers tapped absently against Mickey’s.

It was quiet for what felt like a long time, after that. And then—and then, finally, Mickey just had to know.

He took a deep breath in. “Why did you come here, Ian?” Mickey’s voice was soft. He asked the question the softest he’d ever asked anything. “And I mean for real. Not that bullshit you told me before. This is—it’s all fuckin’ crazy. There’s gotta be a reason.”

Ian laughed, a shaky laugh. A scared one. “You really wanna know?”

Mickey slid his hand under Ian’s, and gripped. “I really wanna know.”

Ian lay back, until he was staring at the roof of the Jeep instead of the roof of the world. He kept their hands linked together. “My mom,” Ian said, finally, “She was pretty fucked up. I mean, like. Really, really fucked up. She was never around, and when she was, it was this whirlwind, like, one day she’s buying us shit and staying up all night cooking and throwing parties, and then she can’t get out of bed for a week, she’s so depressed. She shouldn’t have had kids—not even because she was sick, you know? Just because she was never interested in being a mom. So, obviously, she had fuckin’—six of us.”

Mickey snorted. “Sounds like our moms woulda been best friends.”

Ian squeezed Mickey’s hand. Mickey fell back to lie beside him. “You’re probably right. But, yeah. It was like, through our whole childhood, our dad was this irresponsible drug-addict asshole, but our mom was the one you didn’t want to grow up to be, right? ‘Cause she insisted she gave a shit about us, but then she would disappear, or get arrested, or try to kill herself, and it was always like that. Kids can’t handle shit like that, not all the time the way it was with her.

“We just stopped forgiving her. Stopped giving a shit. But then.” Ian’s eyes were bright. His voice was thick. “Then, like, a year ago, some stuff was going down. And I ran away. Tried to join—well, I guess the closest thing to it here is the military, but I was too young, so I signed up as Lip instead. It was—I felt invincible. I stole a bunch of shit. Tried to steal this, this spacecraft thing, something I definitely shouldn’t have had access to, but I didn’t care, it was _fun_ , and when it didn’t work I took off again. Went back home, and they were all so happy to see me ‘cause it had been months and they thought I was dead or something, I don’t even know, but then I just—crashed.

“I never felt like that before. Like there was no point even being alive. Or—it wasn’t even like that, exactly, more like I was fucking, just, exhausted. I was either awake and it hurt or I was asleep. Didn’t even remember I had a body. It stopped mattering. And then my big sister, I hear her, and she’s saying, this is just like mom. This is how mom is.”

“Fuck.” Mickey could feel Ian shaking. He had no idea if he should do anything about it, what he could even do.

“Yeah.” Ian made a bitter noise. “Genetic lottery, right? Six kids, one of us is bound to inherit the same shit she had. Guess I got lucky.

“Lip would come in and talk to me when I was down, about his work stuff. I don’t think he thought I was listening, ‘cause I never answered, but I was. I started to feel better, after a while. Then I started to feel good. Then I started to have all these ideas, right, all these thoughts, like, would I still be sick if I had a different body? If I got changed, made different, maybe that fucked up part of my brain would go away, right? I was doing crazy shit, fucking up my family, I was basically a fugitive. And I was feeling good, then. It all made sense. I didn’t even think about it not working. I just thought about leaving, and maybe everything would get fixed.”

“And it worked,” Mickey said. “You’re here.”

“I’m here.” Ian echoed. “But. No. Mickey, _I don’t know if it worked_. I don’t know if I’m gonna get like that again. There was no warning, back home, before. I might still be fucked up.” He yanked his hand out of Mickey’s, swiped it across his face. His voice was almost choked to death. “Mick, I’m really afraid that I’m gonna fuck this up.”

Mickey inched closer to Ian, tucked their bodies together. It was cold, cold like Chicago could get, cold enough for snow if Arizona hadn’t been so dry. The air burned when he breathed it in; it smelled like dirt and sweat and laundry, like the two of them and their day. “We got shit like that here, too, Ian. I’m not going to lie to you.” Mickey’s chin pushed into Ian’s shoulder with every word. “But we got ways to deal with it. Medicine. People can get better.” Mickey wedged a hand under Ian’s head and pushed it up into his hair, stroked his thumb across Ian’s neck. “We can make a plan. For if you’re still—if you’ve still got it. You and me. We’ll deal with it. We can figure it out.”

Ian’s breath rushed out of him in one great shudder. “Yeah?” he said, voice cracking. Ian licked his lips, as if to sooth the break in his voice. His eyes were so, so big.

Mickey nodded. And then, he kissed Ian’s mouth.

It was sweet, and slow. It was nothing to be worried about. It only took a moment for Mickey to remember that he was intimately familiar with Ian’s mouth moving against his, that he had already thrown himself across the country for the conjoined pulse that was tapping _mineminemine_ into the meeting point of their tongues.

They kissed like a memory. Wasn’t this how they had started, anyway, with Ian murmuring _west_ into Mickey’s teeth?

When they broke apart, Ian’s cheeks were wet. Mickey didn’t mention it. He didn’t need to, anyway; after a couple of seconds, Ian was laughing, and the tears hardly mattered. Mickey buried a grin in Ian’s neck. “What’s so fuckin’ funny, huh?”

Ian turned his smile against the top of Mickey’s head. “Nothing. Just, what happened to ripping my tongue out, tough guy? That kiss was seriously lacking on the follow through.”

“Fuck off.” Mickey dragged his mouth across the gentle scratch of Ian’s jaw. “Not gonna waste my first kiss on any jackass who asks, am I?”

“That was your first kiss?”

“Fuck _off_.”

“No, I mean—I’m not saying that like a bad thing.” Ian pressed another kiss to the top of Mickey’s head, as if in demonstration. “I wish it was mine, too, honestly.”

Mickey _hmm_ ’ed against Ian’s neck. That long stripe of muscle jumped against his mouth when Ian’s head moved. _Sternocleidomastoid_. “You have kissing where you’re from?”

“Not exactly. Kind of. I mean, it’s the same idea.” Ian’s hand found its way to rest against Mickey’s back.

Mickey allowed it. “Kinda was your first one then, right? First one in this body. Seems like it should count.”

“It _wasn’t_ the first one in this body, though.”

Mickey shot up. “It sure the fuck better have been.” Just like that, his eyebrows were raised and set to kill. His eyes were bright and deadly.

Ian grinned back teasingly. “No, see, when I was laying out there in the desert, it was taking you _so long_ to find me, and then this scorpion sidled up—”

“—don’t you fucking dare—”

“—and I just couldn’t resist, you know, those pincers were just—”

“I _swear to god, Ian_ —”

“— _so sexy_ ,” Ian finished, and then dissolved into a fit of laughter.

Mickey punched him in the arm. “You’re a fuckin’ prick, you know that?” Mickey asked, but he was laughing, too, shaking his head, palm resting on Ian’s stomach where he could feel the vibrations of Ian’s laughter. “First person to shack up with a fuckin’ space alien, and I get _this_.”

“Uh-huh.” Ian turned his open smile to Mickey’s and kissed him again, as best as he could while laughing, which was not very well at all. It didn’t matter. It was good because it was happening. “You wanna go home?”

The words shaped themselves from Ian’s mouth against Mickey’s, and Mickey felt another shiver of déjà vu. “Yeah,” he answered, because all of a sudden, he did.

They pulled apart, wormed their way out of the back of the Jeep. Mickey pushed the raised door down and shut, and unlocked the car from the driver’s side. He locked it again immediately after he and Ian were inside, out of habit.

Mickey backed out of the dirt lot they were in, and turned toward home. There was the dark sky, and the dark ground, and the two of them in between.

“So,” Ian said, over the in-and-out hiss of an inspirational radio program, “you’ve heard all about my family. What about yours?”

“What, like my parents and shit?” Mickey flicked his distracted gaze in Ian’s direction. “Not much to tell. Mom OD’d when I was eight. Dad was a piece of shit, tried his best to fuck up all of us kids. Mostly succeeded, too. He died in March. Best fuckin’ day of my life.”

Ian snorted a laugh. “Sounds like a great guy. What about your siblings?”

Mickey chewed on his lip; his fingers twitched against the steering wheel as he counted in his head. “I got four, that I know of,” he said finally. “Could be more, who the fuck knows? It’s Joey, then Jamie, then Iggy, then me. And then my baby sister, Mandy. Bunch of shit heads, all of them. Except Mandy. Well—Mandy, too, but we were actually pretty close.”

“Were?”

“Yeah. She, uh…she ran off. ‘Bout a year ago. Didn’t tell anyone, didn’t say where she was goin’, just fucked off. I haven’t got a fuckin’ clue where she’s at.” Mickey glanced at Ian again. “I never told you about Mandy?”

Ian shook his head. “Is she cool?”

Mickey barked a surprised laugh. “No, she’s a fuckin’ asshole. Used to cheat at video games and steal my shit. Nosy as fuck, too,” he added. “Always stickin’ her nose in my business, knowin’ shit she shouldn’t. You guys woulda loved each other.” The idea of Ian and Mandy as a united force made Mickey grin. He would never have stood a chance if he had grown up with both of them.

“She sounds hilarious.”

“Yeah, something like that. Hey,” Mickey interjected; an idea had just occurred to him. “You still got my phone? There’s some pictures of her on there. Near the beginning, might even be the first ones. She stole that thing out from under me soon as I got it, used it to take fuckin’ selfies for like a week straight. You should look. People used to think we were twins when we were little, cause we looked so much alike. Obviously that was before she discovered the dick diet and got all fuckin’ pointy, but still.”

Ian thumbed through Mickey’s phone, looking for the photos. “Thought the dick diet was what you were on, Mick,” he said, tone all sideways and sly.

Mickey rolled his eyes. “I like to supplement my diet of cock with some real food occasionally, thanks. Mandy never got that memo.” He took his right hand off the steering wheel to slap at Ian’s leg. “You find those pictures yet? Thought you sci-fi types were supposed to be fuckin’ technology geniuses.”

Ian, it turned out, had found the photos. His eyes were blank, fixed to a photo of Mandy with her middle finger up. He didn’t appear to be blinking.

Mickey did a double take. “Ian?”

“This is Mandy?” Ian’s face was frozen.

“Yeah, I said that was her—what’s wrong with you?”

“This is your sister?” Ian repeated. He swiped to the next picture, a shot specifically taken to show off Mandy’s nose ring, which had been new at the time.

“ _Yes_ , that’s her. What the fuck, Ian?”

Ian took a deep breath, and raised his eyes from the screen. “Mickey,” he said, “I think I know where your sister is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends! I wanted to let you know that there probably won't be a chapter posted next week, so I made sure this one was extra long and extra exciting to make up for it.
> 
> This story is getting pretty close to the end--I'm thinking two more chapters, maybe three. Fun times!! Thank you so much to anyone who has been following this so far, iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou.


	7. Chapter 7

Under the sun, the trailer simplified until it was just a white rectangle on a flat surface. Corrugated metal siding: a white line, then a gray line, then a white line. Rust. A few black squares—the windows. Rickety stairs up to the door, handmade some dusty years ago out of two-by-fours and nails. A dark, wavy shadow would huddled underneath it all, a low-slung pool of shade where the neighbor’s cat sometimes spent the afternoon.

This was the trailer during the day. At night, it became something else entirely: a sketch of a building rather than the reality of one, a suggestion of a place you could live instead of the wrappings of months and months of life. Here, a grey edge; here, a messy streak of true white, kept honest by the endless night at its corners; here, the porch light, a single yellow bulb, a wash of color staining the middle of an already smudged drawing. Each square of window became a mouth, an eye, a void. An absence. A place that had met an eraser and lost critically, or won, but at a terrible cost.

Mickey knew this place. He knew the pressboard floor, and the colorless lake of carpet that bumped over top of it, gritty and dull, stretching from the farthest corner of the bedroom to the twin shores of threshold at the kitchen and the bathroom. He knew the way the pipes screeched when the shower turned on. He knew the lazy blinds and the unfortunate green couch and the slouching slice of stove that _click-click-click_ ed until it finally flickered on. He knew the narrow stub of hallway. He knew the bed.

He went up the steps, and fitted his key in the lock. It stuck, then stuck again, then gave. Somewhere between Mickey and the horizon, an animal made a haunting, shivery sort of noise. Mickey could name neither the animal nor the noise: it was a reminder that this was not where he was from. In some ways, the contents of the night in this place would always be foreign to him.

In the passenger seat of the Jeep, Ian dozed. Mickey had left the car running for him, a little bit to keep the car warmed up and the heater blowing on low, and a little bit to make a silent promise that he would be in and out with their things before the car could idle away too much fuel.

Packing was easy: clothes in the duffle bag, toothbrushes in the duffle bag, a box of off-brand Pop-Tarts in the duffle bag, ‘cause why the fuck not. Two pillows, two blankets, thrown over Mickey’s shoulders and bulging from his arms. Mickey was reminded of the one time Mandy had gone to a real sleepover as a kid, to some richer girl’s birthday party, and she had waited outside the fence for the girl’s mom to pick her up, backpack over one shoulder, pillow pastel and purple and squeezed under her chin. This moment was that moment, after it had been scrambled into something unrecognizable.

Mickey fumbled to relock the trailer door on his way out, then raised the back of the Jeep and threw everything in. He felt more prepared for this trip than for his last one; maybe it was the pillows that gave the illusion of competence, like if he and Ian had to sleep in the car it would be Part Of The Plan instead of a decision that exhaustion would make for him.

It could have been that. It also could have been Ian that made the difference. He was a guarantee of comfort, lit a soft yellow by the Jeep’s interior lights, which had blinked on when Mickey opened the back door. Ian’s hair thrived under that light: he was a boy, and a fire. He was an impossibility wearing skin, and Mickey was allowed to put his mouth on that skin whenever he wanted.

“You good, sleepyhead?” Mickey called from the back of the car. He kept his voice low, in case Ian was actually sleeping, and kept his tone teasing, in case he wasn’t.

Ian’s shock-red hair shifted against the headrest. “Yeah,” he answered, a beat too late, then turned in the seat to look back at Mickey, to meet him with a sheepish, drooping half-smile. “Guess I got tired. I loaded up the map, though.”

“Good. I hate tryin’ to work that thing.” Mickey curled his hands over the end of the door, lowered it halfway. “Hey, shoot Kev a text once we get on the road, will you? Tell him—I dunno what. Tell him I’m, fuckin’, experiencing the great outdoors, or somethin’. Gonna be gone for a while.”

Mickey waited until Ian made an amused, skeptical noise of affirmation, and then pushed the door all the way closed.

He took a final moment to study the exterior of the building he had spent the last few months in; a feeling of intuition, of everyday premonition, told him that the trailer would be the same when they came back to it, but that he would not be.

Mickey got in the car.

*

The trip was a blur of blank road and semi trucks, too dark or too bright and nothing in between. During the long, straight stretches of the drive, Mickey wished for the road to curve for a change; when the road curved, it fucked with his depth perception and had him recalling the straight parts with a little more fondness. Every once in a while, the map on Mickey’s phone would speak up in its precise, feminine voice and direct him to take the next exit, or to keep right, or it would tell him how many hundreds of miles he could look forward to spending on I-10. A glance at the animation on the phone screen usually told him more about the state of the road coming up than the view outside his windshield did.

When Ian’s eyes fluttered shut and his breaths grew slow and sleepy, Mickey would roll his window down and smoke; the habit and the cold outside air kept him awake. Also, he had seen the interested looks Ian threw at his cigarettes, had seen him fiddling with the lighter, and figured that maybe if he limited his smoking to times when Ian wasn’t paying attention, he could avoid being the first person on Earth to get an extraterrestrial hooked on nicotine.

The drive was nine hours to a town in southern California that Mickey had never heard of.

It was downing Red Bull, and listening to Ian sing loud, made-up lyrics overtop of songs he didn’t know, and watching Ian slip in and out of sleep, and thinking about finding Mandy—about _maybe_ finding Mandy—and then not thinking about it, and then accidentally thinking about it some more.

It was Ian waiting for Mickey to take his right hand off the steering wheel, and then lacing their fingers together. It was getting bored and quiet, or bored and giddy, and feeding off of each other’s energy either way. It was stopping at a gas station full of shadows, sitting in the endless quiet of the car, leaning over the emergency brake to kiss Ian in warm, lingering bursts that made the corners of Mickey’s eyes sting and made every space in his body feel heavy and aching and sunlit.

Mickey was tired, and jittery, and hopeful, and so, so in love.

*

This was the story: Ian wasn’t very good at using Lip’s methods of communication, but Lip was.

The story was that science was all about learning new things and gaining ground, and if Lip had made a way to talk to people on another planet, he was damn well going to use it. He was going to find people, and then he was going to find similarities between himself and those people. He was going to learn from them.

Lip liked to talk, liked to brag, took almost as much pleasure in sounding smart as he did in being smart, but there were rules about who he could talk to about his work. Mostly, who he could talk to was no one, but Ian had always been his partner in crime, even if Lip was usually the mastermind. They were brothers. And, anyway, talking to Ian when he was essentially catatonic hardly counted as spilling classified information.

But the story was that Ian hadn’t honed in on Chicago by chance.

The story was that some people had that extra genetic _something_ that made them good candidates for alien mindfuckery, and maybe if there was a girl who had that thing, her brother would, too.

The story was that Lip had to figure his shit out somehow.

*

Ian knew the name of the town, because Lip had talked about it as a good target for a future landing spot—because it was desert, because it had Mandy. _Here_ , Lip had said, _look. She’s the one I’ve been talking to_. _I can show her to you_. _It’s all just signals. It’s what we can catch over distance, like, fuzzy, but see? Isn’t that fucking strange_? _That’s how they look. Kinda—I mean, you can see why this is a good choice for us, right_? _And look at her_. _She looks like she could kick my ass_.

 _She looks like she already has_ , Ian had replied. One of the first real conversations he had participated in after clawing his way out of nothingness.

 _Yeah, maybe_ , Lip had joked—and it was a joke because he was making the thing that allowed the going, but he himself was not going anywhere.

Ian told this to Mickey, and Mickey clenched his hands tight around the steering wheel. He wondered if Mandy had known that Ian’s jackass brother was never coming for her. If she knew now.

It was just past dawn, and Mickey was realizing that he had never made a plan on how to find Mandy once they had arrived.

He was so tired. He was the kind of tired that hurt. The kind of tired where every few minutes his brain would forget to make him breathe automatically, and he only noticed because the last minute mouthfuls of air he sucked in made walls of fuzz rise over his vision. Every breath was an electric shock. His mouth was dry. He swallowed. His mouth was dry. He swallowed. His mouth was

“Mickey,” Ian interrupted, “You need to sleep.”

“No.”

“Then let me drive. I’m awake.”

“ _Fuck_ no.”

“Take a left up here.”

“Fuck off,” Mickey countered, more on instinct than anything—something in him gave a little twitch of self-satisfaction that, even on autopilot, his mouth decided to be contrary—but his body betrayed him, and he felt his hands turn the wheel to make a left.

“That parking lot up there,” Ian added. His voice had taken on a solid, authoritative quality that Mickey found himself responding to in a bone-deep way. He remembered that Ian had been Army—or, well, not Army, but something.

Mickey pulled into the parking lot, turned into a spot. It was luck that there were no cars in his way. He was not paying much attention.

“Good,” Ian said. “Great.” He reached over and turned the car off, and then slid his hand into Mickey’s pocket.

“The fuck,” Mickey sputtered, and flapped an indignant hand at Ian. “Are you—that’s my fuckin’ wallet, man.”

“Yeah,” Ian agreed, amused, impish, and patted Mickey’s knee before opening the passenger door and swinging out. “Stay put,” he added, and then he was gone.

Whatever. Ian was a big boy. Mickey shifted down in his seat. He was very tired.

The only reason Mickey knew he had fallen asleep was that he woke up to the door creaking when Ian returned. He opened his eyes in time to see Ian toss something brown at him—his wallet, it turned out. He tried to catch it, but his reflexes were rusted through with exhaustion, and the wallet landed on his lap.

“Got us a room,” Ian explained, as he ducked back into the Jeep. “Told them we drove all night, and the lady said they had one ready. Two-seventeen. You’ll have to drive around to the other side of the building.”

Mickey’s skin was buzzing uncomfortably, and it took him a moment to understand what Ian was talking about. A room? Mickey peered out the window, made his eyes focus, and realized that Ian had tricked him into the parking lot of a Ramada. “Oh,” Mickey said, then squinted mistrustfully at Ian. “You use my card to pay?”

“Yup.” Ian did not even try to keep the smugness off of his face. “I forged your signature. Nobody even noticed.”

“Jesus.” Mickey stifled a yawn, appraised Ian through sleep-crusted eyelashes. “You woulda fit right in with every other motherfucker I knew back home.” He turned the key, and listened to the engine give its routine fourfold stutter before it rumbled to life. “Other side of the building? Also, you’re an asshole. I said I was fuckin’ fine.”

“You say all kinds of shit that I don’t listen to.” Ian’s jaw was doing that thing it did where it became absurdly prominent, where his eyes manifested a teasing glitter and his mouth made its own set of parentheses. Mickey wished he wasn’t so tired, or so worried, because he would have liked to give Ian’s everything a little more consideration just then.

Instead, he got them to the other side of the building, and Ian shouldered their bag and produced a key card, and they fell out of the Jeep and into the cool, wintery air of early morning.

The sky was a wall of thick, chilly gray. Something wet hit Mickey’s forehead, and then another something.

“I think it’s going to rain,” Ian said.

He was right.

*

The dream was so loud that Mickey heard it, too.

In Mickey’s dream, he was back in Chicago, back at the Kash and Grab, staring through a blurred wall of Takis and Funyons while Ian hovered behind him. They were holding hands; the curve of Ian’s smile was wet against his ear, and Mickey was preoccupied with making sure that Kash couldn’t see them past the store’s eternal pyramid of shriveling oranges.

The whole thing sparked with danger and pleasure. But, like a TV muting itself as a reminder that it played static, too, the Kash and Grab faded and exposed something else. Mickey still held a few details from his real dream: Ian’s arm, white wrist against blue plaid; the beige edge of a shelf; a vague awareness of the bell above the door, behind him and to the right. Those things still existed, but only as smudges behind the new dream.

The dream, now, was a big, white claw mark of a voice screaming _WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU_.

Mickey’s mouth moved, but it wasn’t his mouth, it was Ian’s mouth, and Ian’s mouth made shapes that meant _oh shit_.

 _YOU COULD HAVE FUCKING DIED. WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD_ _YOU PIECE OF SHIT_

_DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW WORRIED WE WERE. WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS DID TO YOUR FUCKING FAMILY_

_look i’m sorry i’m fine i’m in california we just got here_

_WHO IS ‘WE’._

_me and mickey we’ve been living in arizona he’s_

_I CANNOT FUCKING BELIEVE_

_okay calm down look i’m sorry_

_YOU ARE SO IRRESPONSIBLE JESUS IAN—_

“—Where the _fuck_ is my sister?” Mickey shaped his voice into a razor-edged disc, and used it to cut the conversation in half.

He knew who he was talking to. He knew how these dreams worked.

No answer. Mickey made his tone even shittier. “My sister? Mandy? I know what you did, and now I want to know _where the fuck she is_.”

The Ian-part of the dream felt like approval. _oh that’s a good idea actually. lip this is mandy’s brother we’re in monte verde we’re looking for her_

Now, Lip replied, first to Ian: _You are a colossal fucking idiot. We are not done with this conversation,_ and then to Mickey: _If you really are Mandy’s brother, then you are one of the reasons she wanted to leave. I don’t owe you shit and neither does she._

“I don’t know what you think you know about me and my sister, but I guarantee, you haven’t got a fucking clue. She was my _best fucking friend,_ and she _left_ , and you are going to give me her _goddamn address_.” Mickey missed his body, where he had some power. Dreams were bullshit. He wanted to have this conversation with his fists.

There was a pause, and then, _Which brother are you, again?_

 _mickey,_ Ian said, _he’s mickey_

“I’m the one who doesn’t suck,” Mickey added. He pushed down the venom in his voice, and tried again. He reminded himself that he knew how to be angry. He knew how to use anger to get what he wanted from whiny assholes. “Look. Ian’s safe. Maybe he made some bad decisions, but it sounds to me like you made it all happen in the fuckin’ first place, so get over yourself. He’s here and I’ve got him, and now you are going to get with the fuckin’ program and _give me some information_.”

 _Your boyfriend is a prick,_ said the Lip-voice.

 _yes_ , Ian agreed.

“Jesus,” Mickey added, exasperated. “Give me a fuckin’ break.”

 _Fuck you_ , Lip said, and then he told them the address.

 

 

Mickey woke up like he had been shot from a cannon.

“Fuck,” he said, “fuck, _fuck_ , I need a piece of paper, shit, goddamn it, mother _fucker_.” His hand scrabbled across the surface of the bedside table, and came back with an alarm clock, a phone charger, keys, nothing. He rolled to his feet and yanked open the drawer, and—yes, there was a pen, there was the hotel stationary. He scribbled the numbers as quickly as he could, brain to hand to ink, before the details of the dream left him entirely.

“What’re you doing?” Ian’s mumble came from somewhere beneath the pile of bedding that Mickey had exploded out of. He was little more than a lump made of pillow and inauthentic southwestern-print fabric.

“Writin’ this shit down, what do you think?” Mickey scribbled a box around the address, black ink and black ink and black ink, then put the pen down. His hands were shaking, but he only felt a trace of queasiness, which was much better than he usually fared after an alien encounter. After an _Ian_ encounter. “Also, sorry, man, but your brother fuckin’ sucks.”

“You guys would hate each other,” admitted Ian from his fortress of sheets. His head was mostly buried, but his hair was visible, and what Mickey could see was a wreck. “You’re too much alike, or something.”

“Genius space-traveling dickbag versus red-blooded fuckin’ American, I totally see the similarities. Good call.” Mickey hoped that Ian could feel him rolling his eyes, even if he couldn’t see it.

“You’re both smart-asses, and I care about you both anyway. Only two traits that matter.” Ian shifted until he had a face to go with his mess of hair, until Mickey could see that his eyes were sleep-heavy and warm. “Mickey.”

“What.”

“ _Mickey_. C’mere.”

Mickey did. Only when he had a mouthful of shoulder, an armful of boy, did he say, “I didn’t even think about the rain. I should’ve realized.”

Ian shrugged. The end of his clavicle bumped against Mickey’s teeth. “I didn’t think of it either. But maybe this is better. It’s not like I wanted them to think I was dead or anything, just—and, anyway, he was bound to find me, eventually. At least this way you get to see Mandy.”

“Yeah.”

“I wanna meet her. You think she’ll like me?”

“God, probably.” Mickey relocated his face to the general vicinity of Ian’s. He could feel every one of Ian’s exhales like a feather against his cheek. “You ever think about how fucking strange this all is? How unlikely?”

“Sometimes.” Ian’s arm snuck around Mickey’s waist. His fingers plucked at the elastic of Mickey’s boxers, an absent touch, an automatic intimacy. “Mostly, I think about how, once I found you, I knew exactly where I was going.”

“Gayest shit I ever heard,” Mickey mumbled, but he knew exactly what Ian meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello pals I promise this thing is gonna get finished. Sorry I fell off the face of the earth. I would estimate one or two chapters after this, so buckle in and drive safely


	8. Chapter 8

In the end, it was this: a line of apartment buildings, low-slung despite being stacked two units high; a door, painted white, tempered with dirt, pockmarked by strips of wood where the paint-and-dirt combo had chipped off; Mandy, turning locks and the doorknob, opening the door, staring at her brother.

She looked thin, but not as thin as Mickey remembered. She had done something stupid to her hair. Her eyes were huge—and her eyes were Mickey’s eyes, blue, sharp, wary. Mickey had forgotten how sometimes looking at Mandy was like looking into a mirror, just for a moment, just until he remembered to see the rest of her face.

“Nice of you to fucking call,” Mickey said, finally. “So good of you to send me all those letters so I knew you weren’t off getting murdered.”

Mandy didn’t answer. Her mouth was open a little, in a way she didn’t seem conscious of. Her face was shock-pale; there was old eyeliner smudged at the corners of her eyes. Her feet were bare, stopped just short of stepping onto the concrete outside the apartment. Her nose ring was gone. Mickey didn’t know why he noticed that, of all things.

She didn’t look surprised to see him. She looked scared.

Mickey wanted to say, _what the fuck did you do to your hair._ Instead, he said, “Dad’s dead.”

It was like a complicated series of ropes had been holding Mandy rigid and upright, keeping her distant, and Mickey’s words were an axe: he spoke, and the ropes were severed. Mandy seemed to shrink, to collapse in: her eyes closed, her shoulders dropped, her fists relaxed and floated up from her sides to stack against her stomach.

Watching the fear drain from Mandy’s face was like untying a knot, or unclenching tired muscles.

It was like walking out the front door with your middle fingers up. It was like sending your fist flying and believing that it deserved to land. It was like wanting something, and picturing yourself having it, and then taking it.

They were the two youngest, united in being just a little bit smarter, a little bit more open-minded than the rest of their family. There had been a shadow over both of them for a long time, and now they were free.

Mandy’s breath came out, long and shaky. Her eyes were wet when she opened them. “About fucking time,” she said, finally, finally, and then she stepped forward and Mickey stepped forward and they hugged each other like they needed it to stay standing.

For a moment, time tipped inside of Mickey. His forearms pressed against Mandy’s shoulder blades, and Mandy’s sharp chin dug into the space behind his collarbone, and they were _here_ —but underneath the current moment, other moments shifted.

It was November in California, and he was seeing his sister for the first time in more than a year, and it was improbably, blessedly real, but there were other versions of himself living at the same time. There was the Mickey walking home from middle school; there was the Mickey getting out of juvie for the first time, then the second time; there was the Mickey easing twenty bucks out of his sleeping dad’s wallet to order a pizza; there was the Mickey trying to understand that his mom had died. And in each of these memories was Mandy, only ten months younger and all elbows, pushing her arms around him. When they embraced now, they held every version of each other.

Once the world had put itself back together, Mickey let go. He probably, definitely wasn’t crying, but he scrubbed a hand over his face just to be safe.

This was when Mandy seemed to notice Ian for the first time. “Who’s this?” she asked, curious, polite—though more curious than polite, as was her way. She scanned Ian judgmentally, lingering on his hair, on the solid curve of his crossed arms. Mickey resisted the urge to reach over and smack her shoulder.

“Boyfriend,” Mickey said, after a pause. He forced himself to look at Mandy as he said it.

“I’m Lip’s brother,” Ian added.

“Oh?” Mandy said, and then, “ _Oh_.”

“Fuckin’ tell me about it.” Mickey rubbed the corner of his mouth with his thumb, glanced from Mandy to Ian and back. “Might tell you the story if you let us come inside.”

“Go to hell, Mickey,” Mandy said, but her eyebrows were wicked and raised, and she was grinning, stepping back to let them through the door.

It was dark inside, rain-grey, afternoon-thunderstorm-warning-grey. Grey like you build a blanket fort in. Grey like you sit on your couch in, TV off, waiting for your life to change.

“Tell me the story, then,” Mandy said. “Try to make it good.” Her hand found the light switch. She flipped it on.

*

Later, much later, after Mickey had talked about missing time and leaving Chicago and finding a boy in the road, after Ian had talked about hurling himself into a new world and a new body, after Mandy had talked about scraping up two hundred dollars for a bus ride to California and stumbling into a job hours after she had arrived—after all of that, Mickey watched Ian card his fingers through Mandy’s hair.

“No,” Mandy snapped, impatient, “not like that, like—split it into three parts. They need to be the same size, not whatever you’re doing.”

“Okay—I, yeah, I think I did it,” Ian said. He squinted at the back of Mandy’s head. “And then I—”

“—Twist it over, exactly. Right over middle. No, it’s gotta be tighter than that, come _on_ , Ian.”

“Jesus,” Mickey grunted. “Bunch of fuckin’ girls.”

Two middle fingers rose simultaneously to greet him, one slender and tipped in chipping nail polish, one graceful and blunt. Ian and Mandy cackled, and high-fived at their unintentional synchronicity; the braid fell apart.

For a moment, Mickey was a teenager in a way he had never been before. He was sprawled on the floor next to a bag of Doritos they had decimated, lazy and content, watching his sister teach his boyfriend how to braid hair. Nothing illegal, no one to hide from, just a handful of kids being boring and stupid and fun.

It was achingly unremarkable.

It was a miracle.

In many ways, this moment of absurd normalcy was the least believable thing that had happened to Mickey all year. It was as if his mind were split into two pieces: one piece said _I can’t believe she’s here_ and _I can’t believe I said ‘boyfriend’_ and _thank god she’s alive_ and _how the fuck does he exist_ ; the other part said, _look at those goddamn losers. This is what was missing the whole time._

The room was soft with light from the pair of windows in the room, from the dull glow of the fixture on the ceiling. The air seemed as cloudy as the afternoon, cool and secret; the apartment was a tree house, a hidey-hole under the L, a space beneath a coffee table just big enough for two kids to fit in.

Mandy’s furniture was two chairs, a surprisingly nice table someone had left by the dumpster, the world’s ugliest lamp, and a couch she’d taken when her upstairs neighbor had moved out and left all his shit behind. There was a mattress in the corner, hidden by a thick nest of blankets. Her kitchen was bare but for an industrial sized bag of off-brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and a box of hot chocolate packets with an orange discount sticker pasted on the front.

In theory, the apartment wasn’t nicer than their old house had been, wasn’t any fancier than the nonsensical jumble of bedrooms and bathrooms and cabinets they had grown up in—but being there, looking around, it _was_ nicer. It was nicer, and cleaner, and safer. It was all of those things because this apartment was a choice Mandy had made.

On the couch, Mandy slipped a hair tie off of her wrist and handed it over her shoulder to Ian, who wrapped it around the tail of the worst braid Mickey had ever seen. “That bleach job looks like shit,” Mickey commented, and, satisfied with having finally said his piece about Mandy’s hair, he stretched to his feet. “I’m gonna have a smoke,” he added. “Don’t lock me out, assholes.”

“ _You_ look like shit,” Mandy countered indignantly, right before the door closed.

Mickey grinned at no one. He tucked himself under the stairwell, fished out his lighter and a cigarette, cupped a hand against the wind, and flicked the lighter until he had an orange glow and a stream of smoke.

He blew a cloud at the heavy sky. _Take that_ , he thought.

The cigarette was mostly filter by the time Mandy eased the door open and joined him. Her feet were still bare, and Mickey knew the concrete must be cold, but Mandy didn’t seem to notice. She snagged the dented pack of Marlboros out of Mickey’s pocket, and tapped a cigarette out for herself.

Mickey scowled. “Always stealin’ my shit,” he complained, but he offered her the lighter anyway.

Mandy looked at the lighter, looked away, shook her head. She rolled the cigarette between her fingers a few times, back and forth. Mickey gave her a look. “I’m quitting,” she explained, then tucked the cigarette behind her ear. “Turns out that smoking’s bad for you.”

“No shit.” Mickey dropped the last bit of his, a blur of ashes and yellow-orange, and crushed it beneath his heel. “I keep tryin’ to tell that to Ian, but he still thinks it’s all interesting. Hey, maybe if _you_ tell him I’m a bad role model, he’ll actually listen. Now that you’re best friends, and everything.” Mickey tried to sound disapproving, and failed: his stupid smile gave him away, probably.

Mandy knocked her shoulder into his. “Yeah, maybe.”

In the spaces built into their conversation, Mickey’s brain turned. There was something else, something that he had thought of on the drive to California, and it wouldn’t leave him alone. He figured that now was as good a time as any to bring it up. “Look,” he said. “When I sold the house, I got more for it than I probably should have. Some of that money should be yours.”

Mandy was quiet. A few trees lined the parking lot, like green fingerprints smudged onto a gray mirror, and she stared at them with a little more gravity than they deserved. Mickey began to wonder if she had heard him, was about to ask, when she said, “You ever think this whole thing gave us some kind of luck?”

Mickey’s fingers itched for another cigarette; he shoved his hands into his armpits, instead. “Maybe,” Mickey said, after a moment. “Like what?”

“Like me getting a job so soon,” Mandy answered, too quickly for the subject to be something she was just now considering. “Like you finding somewhere to live, like, right away. Like you selling the house so easy. Like things going right. No one’s even tried to break into my apartment here, Mick, not once. And when’s the last time you heard of a shitty car that could drive cross country without any problems?”

“Hey,” Mickey said, offended. “My car’s not shitty.”

“ _Exactly_.” Mandy gave him a meaningful look. “All of a sudden, we’re lucky.”

Mickey thought about this. He thought back to the day he had followed Kev out to the trailer for the first time, and knew it was true. “Well,” he said eventually, “what do you think we should do with all this luck?”

“I don’t know.” Mandy took the cigarette from behind her ear, slid it back into its cardboard container, and put the whole thing back into Mickey’s pocket. “Whatever it is, I kinda think we’re already doing it.”

The asphalt in the parking lot was still damp: it was an exaggerated shade of black, with a few silvery puddles streaked across. A rainbow of oil shifted on the surface of the closest puddle, which was pooled in the gutter next to a square of scrubby bushes. The bushes still had green, vivid leaves, like they didn’t know what November meant.

It couldn’t have been more different from Chicago; back home, there would already be snow.

“Don’t know when you got all smart,” Mickey said under his breath, but only just. Mandy swung at him, and he laughed, loud and sudden, and she laughed too, and it was exactly right.

They chased each other back to the door in feinting, circling steps, giggling and swearing at each other like they hadn’t had any time apart at all. When they tumbled inside, Ian gave them a look of lazy disapproval from the couch.

Mickey hadn’t known there was enough room in his body to love them both as much as he did. Maybe there hadn’t been, before.

Everything he had given up was worth it, if he got to have this instead.

*

They stayed for three more days.

On the first day, Mandy went to work, and Mickey bought her groceries while she was gone. She had cursed at him when she saw the fridge, but then they made French toast for dinner and pulled up a movie on Mandy’s shitty laptop, and she had gotten over it.

On the second day, the old crocheted blanket Mickey had carried across the country like a talisman found its way onto the back of Mandy’s couch, and stayed there. Mandy had complained, but it looked at home in the apartment, on her stolen furniture. It was one of the few pieces of their childhood that they didn’t resent, and so she kept it.

On the third day, Mickey wrote Mandy a check, and her eyes were wet when she saw the number, but her hands did not shake when she signed the back. They talked about maybe moving somewhere else, about how Mandy’s lease wasn’t up until May but maybe, and sometimes you can find houses for rent with basements, and that wouldn’t be too bad, maybe with three people they could do that kind of thing.

Ian talked about places he wanted to see, and things he had already seen, things that Mickey and Mandy were in awe of. Nobody said Lip’s name, but every time the sky clouded over, they all thought it.

On the morning of the fourth day, they got up to leave. Mandy told them to come back for Thanksgiving, to come back whenever, that they should talk more and figure the future out. Ian hugged her, and then slid into the passenger seat of the Jeep to wait while Mickey said goodbye.

It felt wrong to leave, after having spent so long not knowing where Mandy was, but it also didn’t feel much like leaving. _We’re lucky_ , Mandy reminded Mickey, while her arms were around his ribs. Her elbows were as sharp as ever. Mickey scuffed her hair up, and then allowed her to close the door.

When Mickey turned toward the car, he saw that the windows were all fogged up from Ian’s breath, from his body heat being trapped inside. Behind the glass, Ian’s silhouette was a blur of orange and white. It was the first bright flare of a lit match.

As soon as Mickey was in the driver’s seat, Ian solidified—but still, Mickey thought he was too vibrant to be real. Looking at Ian burned a little, even now.

“We need to get you a fucking driver’s license,” Mickey complained, as he slid the key into the ignition. “I’m about sick of doing all this driving myself.”

“I keep telling you I’ll try it.” Ian’s eyes were muddy and green, half lidded in amusement. Some of his freckles were gone, now that it was winter.

“We’d need to get you some papers, first,” Mickey said. “Birth certificate and shit. Hey, can you pull the map up?” He tossed his phone onto Ian’s lap.

Ian started fiddling with the screen. “How do we do that? I wasn’t exactly born here.”

“We couldn’t do it legal, but I know a guy.” Mickey pulled his lip between his teeth, worried at it, and put the car in reverse. “Back in Chicago. Maybe I’ll take you there, sometime. When it’s not the middle of fuckin’ winter, I mean.”

“Sure.” Ian set the phone in the cup holder. His voice was soft. “I kinda feel like I owe a lot to that place. I wouldn’t mind seeing it.”

The GPS voice told Mickey to take a right onto South Avocado Crest Drive, which was a stupid fucking name for a road. He did it anyway.

“That’s a stupid fucking name for a road,” Ian said—and Mickey grinned and grinned until his face hurt, because of Ian, and because of Mandy, and because of the gas pedal under his foot, and because he was lucky, he _was_.

They had a long drive ahead of them, but at the end of it was a bed that was theirs, and a shitty trailer that they had led each other to, and a future they could both decide on. Neither of them were great at making decisions by themselves, but together, they didn’t do a bad job of it at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter left after this, friends. If you're here, then thanks for sticking around. :)


	9. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An ending.

May in Arizona was a gift of heat, and it seemed as if the sun had come to Earth to deliver the gift in person.

It was a gift in the same way that ear mites on a stray cat were a gift, or blisters from a new pair of shoes were a gift: it wasn’t an unexpected bonus, necessarily, but it certainly wasn’t a welcome one. Mickey, who had long since sweated through his tank top, hefted up an overstuffed cardboard box and began a game of _Would You Rather_ in his head.

 _Would you rather,_ Mickey asked himself, _sweat to death from Chicago humidity, or fry like a fuckin’ egg in a state that thinks one hundred degrees is a starter temperature?_

“How many more boxes you think you got, Mickey?” Kev was sitting helpfully on the green couch, making sure that all of the fans were close by and running.

Mickey grunted, and heaved the box down next to the front door. “Dunno,” he said. A bead of sweat snaked its way down his upper lip, and made his words taste like salt. “Like one, hopefully. We don’t have that much more shit than when I got here.”

“Right, cool,” Kev agreed. “Hey, listen—”

Mickey’s eyes rolled to the sky; he dragged them back down with some difficulty, and turned to face his—now former—landlord. “Look, man, you’ve about beat this poor fuckin’ horse into a whole new level of dead. The lady’s gonna take over the lease just fine, Ian says she’s cool, when she asks funny questions just answer her best you can, she’s fuckin’—foreign, or whatever, so she’s bound to say some weird shit. That’s all I got. Don’t know what else to tell ya.”

“Whoa there, cowboy. I was _going_ to say, it was a pleasure having you as a tenant, and we will miss your patronage at the Alibi. No need to get feisty.” Kev crossed his arms, apparently in an attempt to look dignified; the effect was somewhat ruined by the fans, which were pushing and pulling his ponytail into a many-armed hair beast.

“Uh-huh.” Mickey leaned against the wall, and ended his mental round of _Would You Rather_ to begin a game he liked to call _What The Fuck Is Taking Those Idiots So Long_. He started it off nice and easy, things like intergalactic scheduling discrepancies, and the many distractions that could be found at a gas station mini mart. Yeah, that sounded reasonable. He would give himself time to work up to the big guns: horrific traffic accidents, exploding gas pumps. The FBI.

“Well, maybe I was going to say a few other things, too. But can you blame me?”

“ _Yes_ , I fucking _can_ —” Mickey was about to elaborate, if only to distract himself, when the faint sound of tires and an engine rumbled through the cracked window. “Thank fuck,” Mickey muttered, and kicked at the small stack of boxes until the doorway was clear.

Even if he hadn’t been waiting for Ian and Mandy to return, Mickey would recognize the particular hum of the Jeep in any situation. The way it sounded was in his anatomy now, like a second heartbeat: there would always be some part of him that could feel his car stuttering to life around him, crackling over gravel, taking him to meet his future.

Mickey threw the front door open. “Losers,” he announced into the heat, voice set to peak Milkovich Performance Mode, “about fuckin’ time. Did you get lost on your way to the big rock, or was it the two-lane road that gave you trouble?”

Mandy swung out of the driver’s side, and raised her hand over the Jeep’s roof to more clearly display her extended middle finger. Ian opened his own door with less flair; he was halfway turned in his seat, talking to someone in the back.

Mickey’s face split into a smile without asking permission. He was halfway down the steps, on his way to Ian and Mandy, before he remembered Kev in the living room behind him. He flipped around and pointed a finger at Kev, who was already off the couch and stepping over a fan. “Stay there,” Mickey ordered, eyebrows raised severely to punctuate his point, and then he clattered the rest of the way down to his family.

Tiny clouds of dust raised around Mickey’s feet as he walked, each a miniature galaxy of dull, choking gold. His skin felt pulled tight and prickly with sweat wherever the sun touched it. Mandy looked the way Mickey felt; she was waiting next to Ian’s open door, with her arms crossed and her sweat-tacky bangs pushed back from her face. Mickey came to a stop next to her, and unconsciously mirrored her posture: arms crossed, eyes squinted, feet shoulder-width apart. Ready for anything. The sky above them was a clear, searing blue.

“Mickey!” Ian’s grin was clearer than the sky, burned even cleaner than the sun. “This is Veronica—hey!” A slender, lovely hand slapped Ian across the back of the head, quick as a flash. The rest of Veronica followed: she leaned through the space between the two front seats, and gave Mickey a warm, eye-squinting smile.

“You can call me V,” she said, ignoring Ian’s complaints. “I got tired of Veronica right around the time I couldn’t change my mind about it.”

“Right,” Mickey said. “Sure. So you survived the—the space travel, or what-the-fuck ever?”

“I did, thanks for asking,” V said, before turning her smile on Ian. “It’s amazing how much easier these things are when you _follow the goddamn rules_.”

“Thanks for the input,” Ian said, and rolled his eyes. “Just like old times.”

“You know you missed me.” V pressed a familiar, if slightly condescending, kiss to Ian’s cheek, and then leaned back to open her own door. “And after all the shit you put us through? I can say whatever I want.”

Mickey watched her climb out of the car. V had dark, radiant skin, a mass of neat braids, and a megawatt smile; he wondered if all aliens were abnormally beautiful, or just the ones in Ian’s family. “So you’re the first official transfer, huh? Done it all legal, and everything?”

“Sure am,” V said. She was wearing Mandy’s clothes, Mickey was pretty sure. “Ian’s brother was excited as fuck that all this was working out, even if it took Ian acting like a shithead to get things moving.” She aimed another slap at Ian, and missed. “And I was just glad to get out of there. Ian’s sister’s been my best friend all my life, and I love her, but she’s got her own shit, and I just got _bored_. I needed a change of scenery.”

“You’ll love it down here,” Ian said. “Wait until you find out about macaroni and cheese.”

Mickey snorted. “So no more poor, unsuspecting humans gettin’ dragged by their brainstems from one side of the country to the other? ‘Cause as good as that worked out for me and Mandy, I don’t think it’s a great business model.”

“You got that right,” Mandy muttered.

“Lip feels bad about that,” V said. “At least, as much as Lip feels bad about anything. Especially for what happened with Mandy, I think.”

There was an awkward pause, during which everybody thought about looking at Mandy, and nobody did it.

“I needed to leave,” Mandy said, eventually. She glanced at Mickey. “In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter what he told me to get me to do it.”

Because he knew her, Mickey was able to translate: _nothing could possibly hurt as much as living in that house did._

And it was true. If their childhood had been unpleasant for Mickey, it had been hell for Mandy. They were miracles of survival, both of them.

“Holy _shit_ ,” said a voice from behind them, thoroughly rupturing the moment. “I mean, hi. Hello.” Kev had grown tired of waiting for them, apparently, and was descending the few sloping stairs. He extended his hand, retracted it, tried to smooth his hair down, and extended it again. “I’m Kev. Kevin. No, wait.” He smoothed his hair again, shook his hands out like he was preparing for a marathon, then reached out a firm, final time. “Hello, my name is Kevin Ball. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

If Mickey hadn’t known better, he would have said that Kev was the space alien. Apparently V shared his thoughts; she was staring at Kev’s hand like it was radioactive. “You’re supposed to shake it,” Ian muttered, and V made a faint noise of understanding before taking Kev’s hand and giving it a single, forceful shake. Mandy stifled a laugh.

“Excuse me for saying this,” Kev said, dazed, “but you’re, like, the best person that’s ever come to live in my trailer.”

“Great,” Mickey said. “Real nice.”

V’s face opened into her white, blinding smile; her eyelashes fluttered into a single, dark line. “That’s true—I’m so glad you noticed. You seem like a smart man, Kevin Ball.”

Kev squinted at her. “Where’s your accent? I thought you were supposed to be foreign.”

“You think she’ll be alright?” Ian whispered.

Mandy’s expression was sharp and derisive. Mickey smoothed a thumb against the smile that was trying to start at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah,” he said.“I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

*

Their things were packed in boxes and then into the back of the Jeep. Most of their things, anyway: they left V the fans and the dishes, though the likelihood of her ever spending so much as a night in the trailer was decreasing with each word she and Kev exchanged.

The afternoon was warm and bright, and the land was nowhere near as empty as it looked, and they were leaving. _East_ , Mickey had said, and the word had felt so strange in his mouth that he laughed until his teeth hurt.

Ian needed papers; Mandy was hoping that the new owners had torn the house down and rebuilt; and Mickey—well.

Mickey wanted the last laugh. He wanted to walk down his old street and not have to live there anymore. He wanted to walk into Kash’s shitty store and not have to steal a thing in order to eat that night. He wanted to stare at the dark sky in the city that used to be his, and not be afraid, not for a second.

He wanted to stand next to the year-old shadow of his misery, and show it how much it had to look forward to.

Mandy slept in the back seat.

Ian cycled through CDs, and tucked his fingers beneath Mickey’s.

Mickey drove.

It rained the whole way back to Chicago, and it did not hurt at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started writing this story more than a year and a half ago. It was a week after I graduated from college, and I was terrified of every single thing that was going to come next, so I decided to give Mickey a happy ending, even if I couldn't guarantee one for myself.
> 
> I intended to finish this story much sooner than this, but today feels like a good day for it, given that today was also the canonical end of Mickey and Ian's storyline. I feel weird about it, and about the way the show thought things should go. But I know that, at least in this story, they end up okay.
> 
> If you have ever commented, kudos'd, or read this thing that I wrote, THANK YOU. This story means a lot to me, and I appreciate every bit of feedback.
> 
> If you want to come yell at me on tumblr, I'm over there at [sentimentalspiders](https://sentimentalspiders.tumblr.com/).


End file.
